GAO Urges Better Retention of Child Care Providers
GAO Urges Better Retention of Child Care Providers

The Army, along with the other services, should track the effectiveness of child care employee retention efforts, according to a report from the Government Accountability Office.
“The Department of Defense operates the largest employer-sponsored child care program in the United States,” the report states. “While officials in the four military services told us retaining child care workers has been a challenge, none of the military services have established metrics to track the effectiveness of their retention initiatives.”
GAO reviewed DoD and military service documents, conducted in-person and virtual site visits to eight installations with the greatest unmet child care needs, interviewed installation commanders and child care workers and held group discussions with child care workers to come to its findings.
The Army follows almost all the leading recruitment and retention practices, except for establishing and tracking child care worker retention metrics, according to the report. None of the other services even partially track retention numbers, GAO found.
Across DoD, 17,500 child care workers staff approximately 500 of the department’s child development centers and 250 school-age care programs, according to the report.
The report outlines several recruiting and retention challenges for DoD child care workers.
In terms of recruitment, new child care workers “must undergo a lengthy onboarding process” that could last between one and six months, and installations must compete against civilian-sector job openings, according to the report. Issues such as a “stressful work environment” and limited career advancement opportunities plagued retention, the report says.
These issues confound and foster a high turnover rate for child care workers, the report found. Though all services reported “high child care worker turnover rates,” the Army’s rate for fiscal year 2022 was 50%, the highest of the services.
“High turnover rates contribute not only to staffing shortages, but also to child care worker stress and burnout according to some child care workers, child and youth program directors, and child development center and school-age care program administrators at all the installations we visited,” the report found.
The Army has taken steps to ease child care challenges, including creating a position that closes the gap between child care workers and child development center management and “establish[ing] specialized positions for personnel … [to] support child care workers working with children with special needs,” according to the report.
The report urges the Army to develop metrics to track child care program retention initiatives.
“While the military services have implemented many programs and benefits to help retain child care workers, they have not adequately assessed the impact of these retention efforts,” the report found. “By establishing and tracking metrics of success for improving child care worker retention, the military services will have information to better manage retention issues and help address reported staffing shortfalls.”
Read the full report here.