DENVER — Sarah Delamotte started calling daycares the moment she knew she'd be raising her son in Colorado. She searched within an hour's radius of home, and told providers she'd drive up to 45 minutes for the right spot.
It didn't matter. Her son didn't get into any program until long after he was born.
It's an all-too-common experience for many Denver parents, and one Mayor Mike Johnston wants to try to remedy through a task force announced Tuesday aimed at delivering universal childcare.
▶️ Denver7's Veronica Acosta talks with Denver parents amid mayor's new childcare push
"We didn't get into any place until he was about 1," Delamotte said. In the meantime, she and her husband juggled work schedules around whatever partial availability they could find — two days a week at first, more as spots slowly opened up.
By the time her daughter was born, the family thought they'd caught a break: her son already had a spot at a daycare that was expanding its infant room. It still took seven months for that spot to open.
"Having a second kid in daycare was incredibly challenging because the costs are very, very high," Delamotte said. "Sometimes you do question whether or not it's worth it to be paying all of this money when maybe one of you should just stay home."
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Her family's two kids are now in daycare four days a week, at roughly $76 a day per child, plus activity and field-trip fees that add up fast. Colorado's Universal Pre-K program has helped offset some of the cost — 10 hours a week once each child turns 4 — but Delamotte says it barely dents the total bill.
"It's still not very much," she said. "Ten hours out of the number of days and hours they're in daycare — it's still very expensive."
Dr. Cathrine Floyd sees the other side of that math every day. As vice president of early learning at Warren Village, she's opening a new infant classroom this fall — one that could legally hold 10 infants under Colorado licensing rules, but that Warren Village is capping at eight to protect its teacher-to-child ratio.
"I would anticipate that when this classroom opens, it will be full in a matter of weeks," Floyd said.
Floyd says the real bottleneck isn't willingness — it's economics. High-quality early learning is expensive to provide, which means there isn't enough of it, which drives costs up further for the families trying to access it.
"We're seeing centers close. We're seeing teachers getting out of the profession. We're seeing big providers actually shorten the hours of the day so that they have less operating costs," Floyd said.
She said some parents get on five or six waitlists the moment they find out they're pregnant — and still don't secure an infant spot.
"Infant care can be as expensive as sending a child to college," she said, adding that it's often only affluent families who can absorb that cost. For everyone else, the choice is stark: one parent leaves the workforce, or the family turns to unlicensed care with no outside oversight.
Asked what universal child care would mean to her, Floyd said she'd want to see subsidies available for any family that wants an early learning spot but can't afford one.
"Anything the mayor can take on that would make things easier for us, that would bring in more steady financial picture, would be wonderful," she said.
Denver Mayor Mike Johnston has cited similar numbers publicly: roughly 31,000 kids under age 4 in Denver, and fewer than 5,000 licensed child care slots to serve them. Families are paying an average of $25,000 a year per child, Johnston has said — a number that lines up with what both Delamotte and Floyd describe.
In his third State of the City address this week, Johnston announced the Haynes-Gary Task Force, named for two women credited with building Denver's earliest preschool infrastructure. The task force is charged with cutting red tape for child care providers, building a caregiver pipeline, and charting a path toward affordable care for every Denver family — with the goal of "childcare for all" by the end of what would be Johnston's second term.
The city frames the effort as a response to a system that's difficult for nearly everyone in it. Families can face high costs, long waitlists, limited hours, or few options close to home or work, while providers themselves often struggle with staffing shortages, funding challenges, and regulatory barriers — the same dynamics Delamotte and Floyd described from opposite sides of the same daycare door.
Denver says it's approaching the problem through four priorities:
- Reduce Costs — help more families access quality childcare they can afford
- Increase Options — expand access to childcare for families across Denver
- Build the Workforce — support and grow the professionals who care for Denver's children
- Cut Red Tape — make it easier to open, operate, and grow childcare programs
City officials say resident feedback gathered through a listening tour will help shape its future recommendations.
Pressed directly on what changes for families this year — not years from now — Johnston pointed to process, not numbers.
"We're going to both listen to our residents about what kind of childcare do they want," Johnston said. "Because we want to build a system that our residents want, and then we'll work with them to design a plan to do that. We'll pilot that plan next year."
That timeline means the earliest concrete pilot is still roughly a year out, with citywide scaling further off still — a gap that echoes what Floyd described as the core problem: not a lack of urgency, but the cost of building capacity fast enough to meet demand that already exists today.
The listening tour Johnston described is already taking shape. The city has scheduled community meetings running from mid-August through late September:
- Tuesday, Aug. 11 — location to be announced
- Wednesday, Aug. 19, 5:45–7:45 p.m. — Eisenhower Recreation Center (4300 E. Dartmouth Ave., Denver)
- Monday, Aug. 31, 5–7 p.m. — Aztlan Recreation Center (4435 Navajo St.)
- Saturday, Sept. 19, 9–11 a.m. — Hiawatha Davis Jr. Recreation Center (3334 Holly St.)
- Westwood community meeting — location and date to be announced
The one immediate action tied to this push predates the task force itself: City council recently eliminated a duplicative local licensing requirement for child care providers, a fee that previously ran $25 to $200, on top of state licensing that covers the same ground. It's a modest step — city officials have themselves described it as a small piece of a much larger problem — and it does nothing to add capacity in the near term for families like Delamotte's, who are living the math of too few spots and too high a cost right now.
READ MORE: Denver cuts local childcare licensing with hopes of expanding access
For families like the Delamottes, the promise of "childcare for all" is still exactly that — a promise. The listening tour hasn't started. The pilot is a year away. And in the meantime, the waitlists, the per-day costs, and the impossible math of infant care remain exactly where they were before Tuesday night's speech.
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