Two new bills would ease qualification requirements for child care professionals and give parents drop-off and pickup flexibility in an effort to address rising child care costs and staff shortages across the state.

Minnesota lawmakers considered HF 1247 and HF 628 earlier this week in the House Children and Families Finance and Policy Committee.

HF 1247, which would provide flexibility for drop-off and pickup time at child care centers, is on its way to the House floor after quickly moving through the committee. Sponsored by Rep. Danny Nadeau, R-Rogers, the bill extends an existing law that was set to expire this year.

If passed, the bill would extend a pilot program allowing aides who meet the criteria, in addition to assistant teachers, to substitute for a teacher during a child care center’s arrival and departure times.

Jen Orth, owner of Hypointe Child Care facilities in Lakeville and Rosemount, said the legislation has had an impact on both her business and her family. She said seeing her children off to school in the morning and welcoming them home in the afternoon was not possible before the 2023 legislation went into effect.

On a professional level, Orth said the legislation has been transformative for her facilities.

“With this flexibility, I have been able to schedule teachers more strategically, ensuring that they are present when their expertise is much more needed, rather than requiring them to cover the early mornings and late nights,” she said. “This has significantly reduced the need for overtime, which is crucial in preventing burnout and keeping the cost of child care low.”

HF 628 was met with some resistance and tabled for later consideration.

The bill, sponsored by Rep. Paul Torkelson, R-Hanska, would ease some regulations that limit the number of people eligible to work in child care facilities.

For example, an assistant teacher in a child care setting must be 18, have a high school diploma and have at least 2,080 hours of experience in education. If HF 628 passes, an assistant teacher would need to be 16 and complete the required training as currently prescribed under state law.

Maria Harms, owner and operator of Snug as a Bug Childcare in Redwood Falls, said she is concerned about the “mountain of regulations” she is required to integrate into her business model.

“Human error in this field will always exist,” she said. “Licensed care personnel are there to identify those operations that need extra attention, guidance and correction. We are currently experiencing staff shortages, exacerbated by regulation, which creates capacity issues and directly affects sustainability.”

Rep. Samantha Spencer-Mura, DFL-Minneapolis, asked Harms how easing regulations would lower child care costs.

“In order to have teachers, assistant teachers and aides within the classroom, they have to be qualified,” Harms said. “So they have to get an education. They have to do so many hours in the classroom, which in turn requires us to pay them more. If we have to pay our staff higher, we have to charge families more.”

Spencer-Mura responded by saying that child care workers should be paid more.

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“If the affordability in this bill comes from paying the people that are doing the most important work of caring for children less, I just fundamentally don’t think that’s the solution,” she said.

Rep. Nathan Coulter, DFL-Bloomington, also expressed concern about quality of care.

“Child care is education, and I get a little bit anxious when we act as though it’s not,” he said. “It’s arguably more important education than kids will receive at any other time in their lives. We are not only doing a disservice to the industry by ignoring the very real issues, the very real economic issues that make child care a broken system … but more importantly, doing the disservice to the kids.”

Rep. Nolan West, R-Blaine, chair of the Children and Families Committee, said he expects he will soon be spending his entire legislative salary on day care and said they can’t rule out these kinds of changes.

West made what he called a “hyperbolic” example of parents who may not meet every current state requirement for child care workers.

“To say that we cannot look at this or that any reduction in qualifications is completely unacceptable, it basically says that any parent with their first child isn’t fit to raise their child,” he said. “Children don’t necessarily need that kind of regimented education. Some parents might want that path, some parents might not.”

The House advanced another child care bill last week, HF633, which would establish a 50% market value exclusion for in-home family day care or group family day care providers.

The bills come as child care costs in Minnesota are up to an estimated $16,000 per child per year, according to a 2023 study from the Minnesota Department of Human Services. The number places Minnesota fourth in the nation for highest child care costs, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

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At first blush, the conference break-out sessions bore titles reminiscent of an undergraduate course in global studies, like “Leadership and Cultural Competency” and “Tapping Into An Overlooked Talent Pool.” Keynote speaker Jon Baselice, a former immigration policy expert for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, discussed navigating work visa programs to attract and retain workers, and a nonprofit advocate gave tips on managing “second-chance” workers with blemished records.

If those seminar-style trainings sound like they’re part of a course of study offered at a modern college campus, guess again. That was the agenda presented by the Minnesota Chamber of Commerce Foundation — which is attached to one of the most prominent business advocacy organizations in the state — for its annual Workforce Summit, dubbed “National Outlook, Minnesota Focus,” held Wednesday at the Minneapolis Marriott Northwest in Brooklyn Park.

At a time when new federal policies appear poised to slow international migration to the U.S. and cancel rhetoric around diversity and equity, why are some business advocates probing how to leverage all of the above? The answer can be summed up in one word: survival.

“You could be in hospitality. You could be at JP Morgan. You could be producing sheet metal,” said Baselice, addressing the audience. “If you don’t have the ability to hire who you need to hire, we’re kneecapping ourselves.”

Employers scrambling for labor

Nearly 100,000 Minnesotans exited the workforce during the early days of the pandemic and simply stopped looking for work. Thousands have since returned, but there’s still a sizable gulf between then and now, leaving employers scrambling for labor as the post-war “baby boom” generation continues to retire from a workforce held back by low birth rates and domestic out-migration to other states, especially in the college years.

Two trends are increasingly standing out to experts who study labor.

In 2022, the state’s unemployment rate fell to a record low of 2.3%, the lowest jobless rate in the nation.

At the same time, from 2020 to 2024, immigrants accounted for 94% of the net gains in the state’s population growth, according to a report from the Minnesota Chamber Foundation, “The Economic Contributions of New Americans in Minnesota.” Nearly 60% of the state’s labor force growth from 2019 through 2023 came from foreign-born workers.

Some might celebrate that Minnesota, which has a higher percentage of workers with bachelor’s and graduate degrees than neighboring states and most of the rest of the country, continues to enjoy lower rates of unemployment than the U.S. average.

But that’s not all good news, at least in the eyes of employers. When unemployment dips below 4% or 5%, economists raise concerns about inflation. Employers lacking sufficient labor face challenges expanding operations, or even in some cases maintaining basic services. A national shortage of school bus drivers, for instance, escalated during the pandemic, leading to widespread route delays and some route cancellations, as well as changes to school start times in St. Paul.

“There’s significant concern about these entry-level positions that businesses are unable to fill across the state,” said Jeanne Eglinton, vice president of employment services with MDI, a social enterprise company that manufactures plastic containers for clients such as Amazon and Frito-Lay.

MDI is able to keep the factory floors buzzing by relying on a workforce others shun. About half of the employees in the company’s three northern Minnesota plants would qualify as disabled, and 30% need special accommodations, Eglinton said.

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Health care impact

Operators of child care centers have blamed the labor shortage for a crisis in affordable care and the recent closures of some long-standing centers, such as the Hallie Q. Brown Center’s early learning program and another based at St. Catherine University, both of which operated for more than 90 years in St. Paul.

A shortage of home health aides comes at a time when the population is aging rapidly.

“The workforce shortage among home care providers has gotten continually more challenging over the last few years,” said Dan Atwood, a spokesperson for the Minnesota Home Care Association, in an email response to a reporter’s inquiry.

The labor shortage has left many Minnesota employers especially dependent on immigrant labor. Foreign-born individuals account for nearly one in 10 Minnesota workers, according to the American Immigration Council. One in five health care support workers in the state is an immigrant, as are nearly one in five workers in the computer industry, according to the council. Immigrants make up more than 14% of the state’s manufacturing workforce.

Some audience members at the Workforce Summit noted that for years, if not decades, most of the immigration rhetoric from the White House has focused on recruiting high-skill labor from other countries, as opposed to offering year-round work visas for working-class labor that some employers have grown desperate for.

“U.S. immigration policy since 1990 has focused on highly skilled positions, which is good. We value those,” said Ryan Vesey, a business development director with Greater Mankato Growth, the chamber of commerce for Blue Earth and Nicollet counties, which together share the fourth-lowest unemployment rate in the nation.

“But what is absent is a legal immigration process for these ‘low-skilled’ jobs, positions that in some cases take more skills than I have,” Vesey said. “There isn’t a year-round option right now for people who want to be machinists, welders, machine operators. All of those are in-demand positions. They don’t require a bachelor’s degree, but they still require important skills.”

Sean O’Neil, director of economic development and research for the Minnesota Chamber, noted that rural areas in particular would suffer net population losses without immigration, and even so are barely breaking even in many cases. Kandiyohi and Mower counties, for instance, barely gained a few dozen residents from 2020 to 2023. Without immigrants, they would have lost 481 and 506 residents, respectively.

O’Neil said a reasoned argument could be made that Minnesota is short on immigrants, especially outside the metro. Just 8.6% of the state’s population is considered foreign-born, compared to 14.3% of the U.S. as a whole. He noted 80% of the state’s immigrants are concentrated in just 10 Minnesota counties.

An out-migration of workers

Among long-standing pressures for employers, more baby boomers — workers born between 1946 and 1964 — are retiring than there are younger workers to replace them. American birth rates are low, and the number of Minnesotans leaving the state for opportunities like college, graduate school and jobs elsewhere accelerated in the first three years of this decade, according to the Minnesota Chamber.

“Minnesota hasn’t had a great track record in attracting more people than we’re losing to other states,” O’Neil said.

Net domestic migration — the movement of people living elsewhere in the country to Minnesota — was negative from 2020 to 2024, totaling a loss of 48,000 people. Minnesota ranked 41st among states for net domestic migration, and “there is little reason to expect any near-term changes that would dramatically improve overall population growth through domestic migration,” reads the report from the Minnesota Chamber Foundation.

In years past, those domestic losses have been offset by birth rates, which continue to plummet, and by international migration to Minnesota, which looks to slow under President Donald Trump. Recent executive orders have paused refugee resettlements entirely.

Minnesota’s total labor force spans some 3.1 million workers, and the state’s labor force participation rate — the percentage of the working-age population that is employed or actively seeking employment — stood in December at 67.8%, which also exceeds the national average of 62.5%, according to the Minnesota Department of Employment and Economic Development.

The Chamber Foundation found that labor force participation was even higher for foreign-born workers, at 74.3%, than the general population. Nationally, about 20% of U.S. workers are considered foreign-born, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, and that percentage has grown in the past 20 years.

“On the upside, Minnesota’s persistently low unemployment numbers point to steady demand from employers to fill jobs and meet demand,” reads an issue brief published last year by the Minnesota Chamber. “The downside is that Minnesota’s supply of available workers has not recovered from the exodus experienced in 2020 and early 2021 when more than 97,000 Minnesotans left the labor force.”

In short, according to the Minnesota Chamber, “Minnesota’s labor market remains very tight with far more job openings than job seekers.”

Uncertainties

It’s unclear how national debate around immigration will impact that trend.

John Perlich, vice president of government affairs for the St. Paul Area Chamber, said employers are looking for greater certainties as policies and economic outlooks shift moment to moment at the federal level. He and other members of the chamber spent some time on a recent Monday morning discussing how the Trump administration’s potential trade tariffs might impact St. Paul-area businesses and the local economy.

By that same afternoon, that information was outdated.

“Four hours later, all tariffs for Canada and Mexico were on hold,” said Perlich, in a recent interview. “Everybody’s kind of trying to build the plane as they fly it right now, knowing at some point in time, the plane will be out of spec because of changes at the federal level. … There’s cascading uncertainties for employers.”

Business advocates have noted that how a meatpacking plant that employs large numbers of immigrants in rural Minnesota is impacted by those shifting policies may be different than, say, a boutique information technology consulting firm in St. Paul, though both could be impacted by changing immigration patterns.

New climate

The total number of foreign-born residents in Minnesota with a bachelor’s degree or higher has nearly doubled since 2010, according to the report from the Chamber Foundation. Looking nationally, nearly half of Fortune 500 companies in the nation were started by immigrants or their children, O’Neil said.

Responding in part to federal threats to drop vendors that embrace diversity, equity and inclusion — or “DEI” — initiatives, Target recently joined other major retailers in scaling back outreach toward women, people of color and the LGBTQ+ community. That includes ending a multiyear, multimillion-dollar vendor program that promoted Black businesses. Boycotts have followed.

Some are taking the new climate in stride.

Rick Aguilar, longtime organizer of Aguilar Production’s annual Latino marketing conference and publisher of the West St. Paul-based community newspaper Latino American Today, called concerns about immigration raids potentially reducing the number of otherwise law-abiding workers overblown.

“You look at some of the liberal media, and everybody’s yelling the sky is falling,” he said. “I don’t think that’s right.”

Still, Aguilar noted that misunderstandings about the Latino workforce abound on all sides. Less than one-third of Latinos in the U.S. were immigrants as of 2021, according to the Pew Research Center, and 80% of Latinos in the country are U.S. citizens. When he began his conferences in 1997, the buying power of Latinos in the U.S. totaled $260 billion. Today, it’s closer to $3.4 trillion.

“We’re entrepreneurial,” Aguilar said. “We’re the fastest-growing business segment. We’re the largest minority community, and we have been for years.”

Stargazing is a bit of a tradeoff this month. The bad news is that sunsets in March are progressively later, and Daylight Saving Time kicks in. The good news is that it’s not as cold. The really good news, though, is that the great evening winter constellations are still available, although they’re beginning to head to the western exits.

Popping out of the evening twilight in the fairly low western skies will be Venus. It’s so bright you might even think it’s an airplane at first. Venus is so brilliant because it’s fairly close to Earth, but even more important, its complete and thick cloud cover is very reflective of the sun’s light. Honestly, because of the cloud cover and the glare, it’s not much of a telescope target, although you can’t help but notice that it’s shaped like a tiny crescent moon this month. That’s because its orbit around the sun lies inside the Earth’s orbit, and because of that, it goes through phases just like the moon.

(Mike Lynch)

A little below Venus early this month, look for Mercury in the very low western sky, not far from the horizon. Start looking for it even before twilight ends because it slips below the horizon shortly afterward. Mercury’s not nearly as bright as Venus but it’ll be the next-brightest star-like object in that neighborhood. Through the first half of March, Venus and Mercury will be fairly close to each other as twilight tapers but will also start out the evenings closer and closer to the western horizon. By late March, Venus and Mercury will shift to the low early morning eastern sky, rising during morning twilight.

The big story this March is the full moon on the night of March 13-14 because it’ll become a Blood Moon as we’ll have a lunar eclipse. It’s the first lunar eclipse in over two years as the moon crosses into Earth’s ruddy shadow. I’ll have much more on the upcoming Blood Moon in next week’s Skywatch column.

Orion and the rest of the wonderful winter constellations are still performing in the evening southern sky. This will be the last full month, though, that you’ll really be able to enjoy this close-knit group of bright stars. As Earth continues its orbit of the sun, the nighttime side of Earth will gradually turn away from that part of space.

Riding along this year, among the winter constellations are Jupiter and Mars. Jupiter’s the brighter of the two by far and is also the brightest star-like object among the winter shiners. It’s perched just to the upper right of Orion. With even a small telescope, you can see up to four of Jupiter’s biggest moons change positions on either side of the planet from night to night as they orbit the big guy of our solar system. Mars is to the upper left of Orion, right between the Twins in the constellation Gemini. Mars is more of a telescope challenge, however, although with a dark enough and transparent enough sky, you may see murky images of some surface features, including the northern polar cap.

In the northern sky, the Big Dipper is standing up on its handle. The fainter Little Dipper is off to the left, hanging by its handle. The bright star Polaris, otherwise known as the North Star, shines at the end of the Little Dipper’s handle. Polaris shines directly above the Earth’s terrestrial North Pole, so all of the stars in the northern hemisphere appear to circle the North Star every 24 hours in response to the Earth’s rotation.

Spring begins on March 20, at least astronomically. It’s also referred to as the Vernal Equinox when all around the globe, days and nights are nearly equal in length, about 12 hours each. Anywhere along Earth’s equator, the sun will be directly overhead at noon. From this point on, the northern hemisphere receives more sunlight each day, increasing the hours of daylight until June 21. The bad news for us stargazers is that we have to wait later and later for true nightfall.

One of the great constellations of spring is rising in the evenings in the east. It’s Leo the Lion. Look for a distinctive backward question mark that outlines the chest and head of Leo. Regulus is the moderately bright star at the bottom of the question mark that marks Leo’s heart. As March continues, Leo will appear higher and higher in the sky as nightfall sets in.

Enjoy the star-filled and warmer nights of March.

Mike Lynch is an amateur astronomer and retired broadcast meteorologist for WCCO Radio in Minneapolis/St. Paul. He is the author of “Stars: a Month by Month Tour of the Constellations,” published by Adventure Publications and available at bookstores and adventurepublications.net. Mike is available for private star parties. You can contact him at mikewlynch@comcast.net.

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Today is Sunday, March 2, the 61st day of 2025. There are 304 days left in the year.

Today in history:

On March 2, 1962, Wilt Chamberlain scored 100 points for the Philadelphia Warriors against the New York Knicks, a single-game NBA record that still stands. Philadelphia won by a score of 169-147.

Also on this date:

In 1807, the Act Prohibiting Importation of Slaves was signed by President Thomas Jefferson. (The domestic trade of enslaved people was not affected.)

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In 1861, the state of Texas, having seceded from the Union, was admitted to the Confederacy.

In 1877, Republican Rutherford B. Hayes was declared the winner of the 1876 presidential election over Democrat Samuel J. Tilden, despite Tilden winning the popular vote. Tilden remains the only presidential candidate to get over 50% of the popular vote (50.9%) and not win the presidency.

In 1943, the three-day Battle of the Bismarck Sea began in the southwest Pacific during World War II; U.S. and Australian warplanes inflicted heavy damage on an Imperial Japanese convoy.

In 1955, nine months before Rosa Parks’ more famous act of defiance, Claudette Colvin, a Black high school student in Montgomery, Alabama, was arrested after refusing to give up her seat on a public bus to a white passenger.

In 1985, the U.S. government approved a screening test for AIDS that detected antibodies to the virus, allowing possibly contaminated blood to be excluded from the blood supply.

In 2011, the Supreme Court ruled, 8-1, that a grieving father’s pain over mocking protests near his Marine son’s funeral had to yield to First Amendment protections for free speech in a decision favoring the Westboro Baptist Church of Topeka, Kansas.

Today’s birthdays:

Author John Irving is 83.
Actor-comedian Laraine Newman (Saturday Night Live) is 73.
Golf Hall of Famer Ian Woosnam is 67.
Musician Jon Bon Jovi is 63.
Actor Daniel Craig is 57.
Rapper-actor Method Man is 54.
Musician Chris Martin (Coldplay) is 48.
Actor Rebel Wilson is 45.
Actor Bryce Dallas Howard is 44.
Hockey Hall of Famer Henrik Lundqvist is 43.
Actor Robert Iler is 40.
Actor Nathalie Emmanuel is 36.
Country musician Luke Combs is 35.
Singer-actor Becky G is 28.