After the last students and teachers left Mile High Early Learning’s Northeast Early Learning Center on Friday and the door closed firmly behind them, all the chatter and babbling bouncing between two classrooms of young learners hollowed into silence.
The Denver-based child care and education provider, which serves hundreds of children from low-income families, closed its northeastern location to students and is also eliminating 38 slots, equivalent to five classrooms, as it buckles under hundreds of thousands of dollars in financial losses that are still growing.
Facing similar financial pressure, Denver’s Family Star Montessori has cut eight teachers and administrators, scaled back its hours and is planning to close a classroom in August, sell one of its two buildings and move into a new location to save money.
A freeze in the Colorado Child Care Assistance Program — stemming from changes made under the Biden administration — is to blame for the uncertainty. The situation is worsening as enrollment freezes and waitlists have expanded to at least 24 counties, leaving low-income families of more than 6,600 Colorado children with few options for child care, according to data from the Colorado Department of Early Childhood from early June. That’s up from more than 5,700 impacted children recorded at the beginning of May.
Warnings from early childhood education advocates and providers about the possibility of centers closing or reducing programming in the midst of the freezes are beginning to pan out, with concerns of more closures across Colorado’s child care landscape only escalating.
When asked if Family Star Montessori can survive continued funding cuts stemming from the enrollment pause, executive director Lindsay McNicholas told The Colorado Sun she simply doesn’t know.
“We’re going to try,” McNicholas said. “We’re fighting real hard to figure out how we do that.”
The red light to enrolling more students was born out of well-intentioned federal rule changes designed by the Biden administration to better support families in need of affordable child care. Under the new rules, adopted in March 2024, families that receive the subsidy pay a smaller fee out of pocket — 7% of the family’s income, down from 10%. The new rules also direct counties to pay providers in advance and distribute funding based on enrollment rather than attendance.
The Family Star Montessori School as seen Friday June 27, 2025 in Denver, Colorado. (Jeremy Sparig, Special to The Colorado Sun)At the same time, Colorado must pay child care providers at a higher rate than a few years ago after a routine federal review found the state was falling short in how much it paid providers.
The problem is the new rules came with no federal funding and will cost the state close to $70 million a year to implement.
The freezes, which took effect in some Colorado counties last year and have no clear end in sight, mean that counties are not accepting new families into the assistance program and, when kids currently enrolled in the program transition out, are not adding new children in their place. Even though the new rules don’t take effect until August 2026, counties are pressing pause on enrollment so they don’t find themselves with more children in the program right before costs jump significantly for the state.
Children engage in classroom activities, Friday, June 27, 2025 at the Family Star Montessori School in Denver, Colorado. Family Star Montessori, which cares for 250 children at two locations and through a home-based learning program, has cut staff, reduced hours, and is closing a classroom while experiencing a slash in funding from an enrollment freeze in the Colorado Childcare Assistance program. Leaders of the early learning center—which also offers regular food distributions—worry about additional funding cuts as the enrollment freeze continues. (Jeremy Sparig, Special to The Colorado Sun).But that also leaves thousands of Colorado families unable to find affordable child care, which directly interferes with parents’ ability to work and hurts the state’s economy, said Jennifer Stedron, executive director of Denver nonprofit Early Milestones Colorado.
“It also allows others to work so it is one of the few sectors that sort of does double duty for the economy,” Stedron told The Sun, “and I don’t think that we treat it as a primary economic engine in the way that we should. I just think it’s time to stop treating it as a nice to have or an after thought. We’ve got to put it front and center if we want a healthy economy.”
“A greater cost later on”
It’s unclear whether the Trump administration will keep the new rules in place or repeal them. However, the Colorado Department of Early Childhood has reported that during an American Public Human Services Association conference earlier this month, Andrew Gradison, acting Assistant Secretary for the Administration for Children and Families, said the administration opposes the rules and plans to repeal them.
The Administration for Children and Families, housed within the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, did not respond to a request for comment.
“Now we’re in kind of this next gray area where, unless it’s officially repealed, we still have to do those policies” or risk losing significant funding, Sarah Dawson, director of the Colorado Child Care Assistance Program for the state early childhood department, told The Sun.
“We really need to learn what their philosophy is going to be about the program and if any of that lines up with the Biden administration or not,” Dawson said, adding that even if the Trump administration reverses the rules, it’s hard to know whether that would end the enrollment freezes in Colorado.
In the meantime, providers like Mile High Early Learning and Family Star Montessori are hemorrhaging money and bracing for the possibility of shrinking programs again in the future.
Since January, Mile High Early Learning has lost about $270,000 thanks to the enrollment freeze, president and CEO Pamela Harris said. The center estimates it will be down an additional $408,000 next year, followed by $600,000 in 2027.
“How do we do this?” Harris said. “How do we make the best decisions with much more limited funding?”
Mile High Early Learning decided to close the smallest of its seven Denver locations and drop 38 child care slots, transplanting its students to its other sites and to facilities run by providers it partners with throughout metro Denver.
The organization — which will convert the closed space to a hub for training teachers — has not removed any students from the child care assistance program, but its enrollment will dip by nearly 40 families in what Harris called a “heartbreaking” shift. After rolling back programming, Mile High Early Learning will be able to offer 451 slots for child care.
Harris said she worries where children in need of the assistance program will end up now and far into the future, particularly with research backing up the promising path quality early childhood education puts children on, steering them toward graduation and a job and away from the criminal justice system.
“I know that parents are doing their best and we were helping them to be able to do that,” she told The Sun. “That’s a lot of children, a lot of potential and all of the things we know about early childhood and the impact on children and their later achievements. So I worry about that. Children aren’t going to have special intervention services as early as they might need, which means there’ll be a greater cost later on.”
McNicholas, of Family Star Montessori, estimates her center’s budget is taking a $30,000 hit every month because of the enrollment freeze, which will add up to a loss of as much as $400,000 this year. That deficit will grow next year. She estimates the organization will pull in about $400,000 through the assistance program in 2026, down $1 million from the $1.4 million it received last year.
The financial turmoil has rattled McNicholas, whose center serves about 250 children ages 8 weeks to 6 years old through its two schools and home-based learning program.
Children engage in classroom activities, Friday, June 27, 2025 at the Family Star Montessori School in Denver, Colorado. Family Star Montessori, which cares for 250 children at two locations and through a home-based learning program, has cut staff, reduced hours, and is closing a classroom while experiencing a slash in funding from an enrollment freeze in the Colorado Childcare Assistance program. Leaders of the early learning center—which also offers regular food distributions—worry about additional funding cuts as the enrollment freeze continues. (Jeremy Sparig, Special to The Colorado Sun).She hopes that selling one of the organization’s buildings, an aging facility requiring more maintenance, will set her team up for a sustainable future.
“It’s important for our young children, yes, but it’s really important for our state in order to function and have laborers to do the essential work that needs to get done,” McNicholas said. “When we have support for early child care in the state of Colorado, we can have the labor that is required to do the necessary and essential functions of our society. If you want someone to drive your bus, you want someone to do your bloodwork when you go to the clinic, we have to have someone there for our essential workers’ children.”
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