When Stephanie Burke moved from Southern California to Colorado in late 2021, she left behind employer-provided childcare for a drastically different situation. Her Green Valley Ranch neighborhood was a child care desert: a place where there are more children than there are people to care for them.
“I personally called 28 childcare centers throughout Green Valley Ranch and the Denver metro area,” Burke said. “Every center I contacted either had no infant openings or had waitlists. Many of those waitlists were 12 to 18 months long.”
New to the community and with no relatives nearby, Burke’s husband left his job in aerospace engineering and stayed home with their two kids, 3 and 11 months, for nearly a year…