Charli Cooksey remembers the moment she was late for a meeting with Miss Bettie—a 24-hour home childcare provider whose center was hit by the May 16 tornado in North St. Louis.
“It was the day after the tornado hit, and we were touring elected officials around the damage. I apologized for running late, and she said, ‘It’s OK; I’m used to waiting,’” recalls Cooksey, founder and CEO of WEPOWER, a community activist organization.
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An estimated 40 early childcare centers and more than 1,000 children were impacted by the May 16 tornado that ravaged the St. Louis region. And although nonprofits, community organizations, and volunteers have rallied to support those affected, both families and providers navigate daily hurdles caused by limited government funding and hurdles to access disaster relief. “Black women have held up systems of childcare since the inception of this country, and we continue to rely on them to keep everything going,” Cooksey says. “There is no economy without the childcare economy. And it’s just … how long do they have to wait?”
Miss Bettie, for one, is still waiting—her center remains closed at this time.
The lack of affordable childcare is a crisis that existed in the St. Louis region long before the natural disaster. According to WEPOWER data, the average cost of childcare in St. Louis can add up to $31,632 per year, and 20,000 economically disadvantaged children currently cannot access early childhood education, “leaving many families without viable care options,” Cooksey explains.
Those issues, now exacerbated by physical damage to centers themselves, as well as the emotional and mental toll on providers and their families alike, have perhaps never been more pressing.
The providers
When the storm struck Roundabout Home Daycare (4710 Sacramento), owner Jennifer Burgess wasn’t thinking of herself. She was thinking of the families she serves. The home she operated her daycare out of suffered damage to its roof, backyard, and fence. “Thank God for the churches and the people that were just going around in the community, helping, because that’s pretty much how I survived for about maybe two or three weeks,” she says.
Burgess worked fast ensuring her home daycare was protected from water damage or mold and securing her fence for outdoor play options. “It’s secure only because of the community that I’m living in that has helped,” Burgess says. “I reached out to all the organizations that supposedly help in these situations, like FEMA, the city of St. Louis, and things of that nature, and I really didn’t get the help that I was supposed to get. I’ve pretty much been spending for myself and getting help from family and friends, just so that I wouldn’t have to close my business for months, to keep going for my parents that pretty much were out of their own homes that needed me to take care of their children.”
The families at her daycare arguably lost much more: entire homes, cars, fallen trees. Three sets of parents out of the 10 she serves are still living in hotels. “Kids can’t even go out and play in all this mess,” she adds.
Burgess—although unpaid during the time her business was inoperable—has been taking up donations for those families, and even waiving payment for those who found themselves without their cash or credit cards. “Just bring the baby,” she tells them. “We’ll figure the rest out later.”
According to WEPOWER, the median wage for early childhood educators in Missouri is $11.71 per hour, nearly 21 percent below the state’s living wage of $14.82 per hour. “I’ve been providing daycare for over 30 years, and what I do is from my heart. I put taking care of the people that I serve first,” Burgess says. “As a provider, both during COVID and now, I just went outside of the business aspect of it and treated these families like they were my family.”
Burgess says she’s finally returning to some normalcy, but she knows she’ll never recoup what was lost, and she says she’ll never ask for those missing payments back. “’I know that if I close my business, it would devastate the families that I serve because they depend on me,” she says. “I love the people that I care for and that I work for. So, yeah, it was pretty devastating, and it still is. I’m so disappointed at how things went—how you kind of feel like you’re on the island by yourself when you reach out and you’re making calls to City Hall. You’re making calls to your [elected officials], and you’re not getting any help … It’s been eye-opening, what I’m dealing with.”
The families
Paula-Breonne Vickers isn’t just WEPOWER’s director of early childhood power building—she’s also a North City resident and mother of two. “I’ve been less involved in the WEPOWER tornado response, mostly because I was out immediately following the tornado, so that I had time to really take care of myself in my home as well,” she says.
Vickers says her family was fortunate not to be at their home, at Ashland and Taylor, when the tornado hit. “I say fortunate because I still cannot wrap my head around what it would have been like to try to get my children out of the neighborhood,” she says. “When I went to my home later, after the tornado, you couldn’t get a car up and down the street. And so I’m grateful that my children have been shielded from the immediate experience of the tornado, but also, the visuals of the aftermath that were immediately after.”
Immediately following the storm, Vickers and her 3- and 5-year-old started staying in her aunt’s small home; they still have yet to return home. In a way, she says, having access to consistent childcare has been saving her life. “I have children that have lots of energy and have lots of need to get energy out, and so I’m grateful that they have childcare to go to because the most consistent space for them has been childcare,” she says. “Throughout this whole ordeal, they were still able to keep their trusted and safe space within their childcare centers.”
Because she had a reliable place to send her kids, Vickers says, she has been able to deal with the endless inspections and work being done at her home. “Before any work even happened, there were at least like five or six inspections,” she says. “Looking back at that part of it is like reliving a trauma all over again. You keep going back, and the neighborhood looks worse each time you go back because each of the homes that have not been stabilized are falling more and more. So every time I go back to my neighborhood, it looks different, but not different for the better.”
Vickers says she’s lived in North City her entire life and has always felt safe in her neighborhood. She’s never had any intention to leave—until now. “Because there’s so much devastation and so many people have been forced to leave their homes, because their homes aren’t there anymore, I’ve seen an increase of drug usage coming into the area because people know that people aren’t in the area to report it. And as a single mom, even though now my home is finally repaired, I always worry about what it looks like to have to get my boys inside of the house. There’s this new fear of people who are not from my neighborhood coming to my neighborhood and not doing good things. All that to say, we’re still at my aunt’s house, even now.”
Vickers says she originally had a “delusion” that North City would return to itself in a month or two following the storm. She’s now facing a different reality. “Some areas are back to normal, and they look like they weren’t hit,” she says. “But my area doesn’t look like that. And I don’t want my boys to see that that is how our community has been left.”
What comes next
In recent years, WEPOWER has been focused on identifying a source of public funds to support early childcare providers. The organization was behind Prop R, which in 2020 earmarked $2.3 million annually in city tax dollars for early childcare. They were proponents of a sales tax hike in the county that same year. It was withdrawn by its sponsor after drawing an “uproar,” reported the Post-Dispatch, due to concerns that the money would go to private entities with little oversight.
In 2024, WEPOWER returned to the city Board of Aldermen, seeking its support in putting a half-cent sales tax hike on city ballots that November. The proposal faced opposition from advocates for public schools, and the Board of Alderman ultimately did not end up voting on it. The organization also sought to obtain $100 million in Rams settlement funds for an early childcare endowment, but aldermanic plans to spend Rams money—a plan that included the lesser sum of $30 million for early childcare— collapsed in February.
WEPOWER hasn’t given up the fight. Vickers explains that a long-term public investment is what’s needed both to heal what’s been broken, and to reinforce the community for future concerns—starting with simply paying fair wages to childcare providers. “So many of the meetings that I go to have people talking about, How do we rebuild and repair North City?” Vickers says. “And they give this really heartbreaking timeline of seven to 10 years for when our city will look like our city again.”
As a parent, she explains, she’s just looking for stability for her children. “I don’t want to leave my city,” she says. “So I just hope that the city can look at what it looks like to invest in childcare on the front end, so that when these things happen, they aren’t completely under water. Our providers have already been so underfunded and underserved, so in these extreme circumstances, they’ve been tapped out.”
Across St. Louis city and county, WEPOWER says there’s “an annual funding gap of more than $580 million between what’s invested now and what’s needed for high-quality, universal early childhood education.” Vickers adds that she worries that elected officials assume providers and families will just bear the weight of childcare in emergent situations, like they have since May 16. “Your heart can only go so far because the bank doesn’t care about your heart,” she adds. “Interest does not get paid with love. So yes, providers find a way and parents find a way, but that has to stop being the expectation or the norm because it’s not going to sustain us. As centers have no choice but to close, children are put in danger because when they lose that stability, parents lose that stability.”
Even before this, Vickers knew providers who had to sell their cars or turn the heat off in their homes to save money. Now they’ve been pushed to the brink.
“There’s a consequence of the norm just being that the people that love children will suffer,” she says. “There is no other workforce that comes to work without getting paid. And not only are these women coming to work without getting paid, they’re using their own money on top of not getting paid. And that is insane.”
What it means for St. Louis
Vickers and Cooksey emphasize that their other lofty goal is convincing families not to leave St. Louis. “I keep having something replay in my head that I heard last week: When families of younger children leave, they’re less likely to come back because like they put down their roots for children somewhere else,” Vickers says. “If we do not want St. Louis to lose population at an even greater scale, we have to make very drastic and bold moves now.”
The investment in childcare is not just about the kids or the economy—it’s about women’s rights, Cooksey adds, noting that women make up 90 percent of the childcare labor force. “I think it’s way past time; I think it’s unacceptable for people like Miss Bettie, people like Miss Jennifer, to be so used to waiting [for support],” she says. “Not only is it a disservice to them; it’s a disservice to our children, our babies.”
Cooksey urges people to donate to the Early Childhood Tornado Response Fund, which has raised $726,669 for tornado relief to date, to assist affected centers and families and to contact elected officials to let your voice be heard.
She notes that all the data points to childcare support as a backbone of the community. “The return on investment is off the charts,” she says. “Of every dollar invested, there’s up to a $13 return on investment. There is just no way we can rebuild St. Louis City–there’s no way we can repair the physical harm of the tornado, the intangible harm of this tornado, there’s no way we can repair the systemic and decade generations of disinvestment in our region, the harm done to Black people—without making an investment into childcare…because it is the basis of everything that we rely on.”
That foundation is what Cooksey says is needed to see St. Louis thrive. “It’s such an urgent thing, and it’s such a clear solution,” she says. “We see there’s federal attacks on funding; there’s state challenges that we’re about to confront—the state’s budget has been relying on things like ARPA funds, and those dollars are about to disappear. So [providers are] about to face a serious crisis of funding, and we have an opportunity to solve this at the local level. We need to do it, and we need to do it soon because it’s already past time. St. Louis needs a win, and this win will have ripple effects for generations to come.”
