John’s Pharmacy opens day care for employees' children

John’s Pharmacy is set to open a day care for employees Monday, July 10.

The pharmacy is taking steps to address struggles in finding child care for its present and future employees. Owner Abe Funk said a lack of child care has kept it from hiring certain employees.

“We’re at a significant child care shortage in this area, so we’ve lost lots of good job candidates. We’ve had good employees who want to work, but either can’t afford child care or can’t find child care,” Funk said.

Funk said many pharmacy employees are women of childbearing age. When he couldn’t find child care options, he decided to start one as part of the pharmacy. Funk described the pharmacy as “blessed” to have seven locations that can be used to subsidize a day care.

He said the cost of adding a day care was “well into six figures.”

“It’s a very expensive process,” Funk said.

Funk said he also worked with state Lt. Gov. Mike Kehoe to pass Senate Bill 509/House Bill 870, which would incentivize businesses to operate day cares, with the businesses eligible to receive state tax credits. He lamented that the legislation did not pass during the recent legislative session.

Funk said while he has run pharmacies and other businesses, when creating a day care, he learned a whole world of regulations. He described local inspectors and Department of Elementary and Secondary Education agents as “wonderful” to work with, but the regulations are “extremely difficult”.

“There needs to be significant child care overhauls to get us where we need to be. I was not a child care advocate until the last few months when I learned about this,” Funk said. “It’s not a profitable business model. It’s very hard with some of the regulations.”

He also said state Sen. Holly Thompson Rehder helped him navigate the regulations.

Funk said another difficult part was acquiring necessary licenses for the day care. He said while some approvals were similar to restaurants, such as from a fire marshal or for sanitation, getting all the rules to line up for the final approval and license from DESE was difficult.

“One set of rules doesn’t necessarily agree with the other set of rules,” Funk said. “We’re a smaller child care facility. We’re for 20 or under. And the day care rules for 20 or under are different from the sanitation rules for 20 or under. And so guiding our way through that at times was a difficult process.”

He said right now there will be about a dozen children in the day care, and it will max out at 18.

Funk said the day care will start out with three employees, but will “probably” add a fourth later in the fall.