Davis led a roundtable discussion at the Sheetz Corporate Support Center in Claysburg to promote key investments in early childhood education included in Gov. Josh Shapiro’s 2025-26 state budget proposal.

The centerpiece of this investment is a new $55 million workforce retention and recruitment grant program, which would give early childhood educators who are employed at a Child Care Works-partnered facility a $1,000 annual bonus.

“We literally would not be here today if it wasn’t for child care and child care workers,” Davis said, noting that his daughter, Harper, was currently enrolled in a child care facility.

As a “proud working mom,” Blayre Holmes Davis said that the topic of child care is important to her and her husband.

Mirror photo by Conner Goetz

Stephanie Doliveira, executive vice president of people and culture for Sheetz, who co-chairs the state Early Learning Investment Commission with Lt. Gov. Davis, facilitated the roundtable discussion.

Blair County Commissioner Laura Burke, ABCD Corp. director of business expansion Matthew Fox and Blair Companies President Philip Devorris joined the Davises on the panel, alongside a trio of Sheetz employees.

“We are a very large employer. We are now in seven states, 27,000 employees, so for a lot of our employees, having access to high-quality child care is essential in being able to come to work,” Doliveira said.

Doliveira said that Sheetz is evaluating ways to support its remaining 25,000 employees who work elsewhere in the region, which may include scholarships and/or partnerships with individual child care facilities.

According to Davis, child care is “infrastructure,” and “just as important for a functioning economy as roads and bridges, as mass transit and internet.”

Lt. Gov. Austin Davis tours the Little Sproutz Early Learning Center with Pennsylvania second lady Blayre Holmes Davis and director Betsy Baragar after a roundtable discussion on state investment in child care on Wednesday in Claysburg. Mirror photo by Conner Goetz

Without appropriate child care, the state economy would be crippled, Davis said, since the lack of child care access and affordability affects Pennsylvanians at every socioeconomic level.

There are currently about 3,000 unfilled early childhood educator positions across the commonwealth, which means that there are approximately 25,000 children who cannot access that service, Davis said.

Davis said that he, alongside Gov. Josh Shapiro, is “really leaning into this issue” and is taking action.

Although the legislature has made sizable investments into child care over the past two state budgets, including new and reformed tax credits and almost $100 million for Child Care Works, which subsidizes child care costs for families, there is still work to be done, Davis said.

The child care workforce shortage impacts working families and the broader economy, he said, due to lost earnings and lower productivity for parents.

“When we bring together government, nonprofits and the business community, and great private sector partnerships like we see here at Sheetz, we can do anything in the commonwealth,” Davis said.

According to second lady Davis, investment in early childhood education is “pro-worker, pro-business and pro-family.”

Later in the event, Devorris said that finding and retaining staff is the “lifeblood” of every business, which can be a challenge in rural areas with shrinking populations.

He said that it is important to educate parents on the value of child care, since it is an “investment” in their kid’s future which pays off later in life.

Devorris also said that it is an issue that could cut through political division, since child care investment is broadly supported in the local community.

Fox said that while he couldn’t think of a single employer in Blair County who thinks that child care is unimportant, the issue is how to achieve that goal.

Companies also see child care support as an employee-retention strategy, Fox said, akin to wages and insurance benefits.

“Just because (an employee) isn’t utilizing daycare services now doesn’t mean there won’t be a need in the future,” Fox said.

Child care support has a positive effect beyond an employee’s immediate family, Fox said, since grandparents, who have careers of their own, often take time to help out when the parents have to work.

The lieutenant governor said that when he was young, he had both sets of grandparents available to watch him while his parents worked, but that is becoming increasingly rare as more people put off retirement to stay in their careers.

Burke said that one of the strategies commissioners implemented to address a recent “crisis” in Blair County Children, Youth and Families was creating part-time positions, since some of the full-time employees who left did so because they were unable to find suitable child care.

“That flexibility, even child care costs provided specifically for employers in that field, would be helpful,” Burke said. “We see a lot of the people we serve, so many of their issues are caused by that lack of appropriate child care.”

There is an opportunity to explore the “root causes” of these issues, and whether expanded access and affordability could help some of those issues, Burke said.

After the roundtable, the Davises toured the Little Sproutz Early Learning Center, a child care center located across from the Sheetz Corporate Support Center in the Martin J. Marasco Business Park.

The learning center, which opened in 2018 in collaboration with Bright Horizons, gives the approximately 2,000 Sheetz employees who work on the Claysburg campus a nearby facility for their children.

Mirror Staff Writer Conner Goetz is at 814-946-7535.