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Ivy W. Downing never planned to be a single mom. She didn’t plan to be on welfare, either, she said, but after escaping an abusive marriage at 33, it was her only option. Four years later, Downing, now 37, has been off welfare for nearly a year, and is halfway to earning a college degree.

In order to actually earn it, though, her days are strictly structured around shuttling her three kids between day-care facilities (yes, plural) and babysitters while still making it to work and school.

For Downing and many parents, child care is the finger in the dam that keeps life in order instead of it rushing madly past her. It is a necessity, but its hold is precarious and it is a constant worry.

It’s scarce. It’s expensive. And in most cases, it stops at the end of the business workday, not hers, because the need for child care spills well past 5 o’clock for many parents.

It’s a problem that the state, as well an ad hoc group of local business, child care and welfare leaders are studying how to fix. But the answers are far off as even the extent of the problem is unclear, they said.

And whatever answers they do find won’t help Downing now.

Her extended welfare benefit for child care ends at the end of May, and her out-of-pocket costs will shoot up nearly 500 percent.

“I’m trying not to think about it, but it’s not going to go away,” she said. “I’m just taking it one day at a time, one moment at a time, and trying to work it out.”

Need for care is great throughout the region

Downing is not alone.

According to the U.S. Census bureau, nearly 8,600 children ages nine and under, live in Cheshire County. More than 1,000 live in households subsisting below the poverty line. Of those households, 345 are headed by single women.

There’s no current estimate of the region’s capacity to care for those children, but a recent, state-led count of licensed programs in the Keene area came up with 2,706 slots for kids. Plenty of people use less formal arrangements — family, neighbors or providers who take three or fewer children and don’t need to be licensed — but those are uncounted.

Downing, for example, relies on a neighboring family to watch her children for several hours on Monday and Wednesday afternoons.

Her two youngest children, Julia, 2, and Matthew, 5, a kindergartner at Franklin School, go to the Keene Day Care Center’s programs for younger and school-age children, which are in separate buildings. One closes at 5:15 p.m., the other at 5:30 p.m., but Downing’s justice studies class at Keene State College goes until 5:50 p.m.

To cover for those 35 minutes without care, she picks up her kids after work and has them home by 4 p.m. to meet one of several babysitters she knows who may be available. Downing’s 11-year-old daughter Tiffany is still too young to be in charge, she said.

Downing doesn’t know how long the arrangement will last, but it’s the best she could find given Matthew’s allergies to cats, which often makes home day care hard to find, she said.

Even during the day, care can be elusive.

Many, if not all, of the spaces at licensed centers are taken, especially for infants and toddlers, said Kathy Torrey, director of Child First Child Care Resource & Referral, a local agency that connects parents with child care.

In the last year, for example, her center referred 281 people to providers.

In follow up interviews with 52 clients, 18 reported they couldn’t find a space, she said.

In that same year, 42 clients have come back for another referral, she said. Of those call backs, 29 wanted care for children 2 and under, she said.

Not all programs accept infants and toddlers, and waiting lists for some that do can top nine months, she said.

And in recent months, calls to Child First have tripled, Torrey said. They jumped from 50 between September and December to 144 between January and March, 64 of which were for children 2 and younger, she said.

In that same period, she said, she heard of only nine new infant and toddler slots and 42 school age ones.

She attributes the increase to upcoming changes to the state welfare system, called Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF). Because of new federal requirements, as many as 1,100 more state welfare recipients will need to be working by October (see related story).

“There’s a sort of desperation that I’m witnessing,” Torrey said.

The child care needs for those workers can be particularly tough to fill, she said.

For one, child care is expensive, and can be a burden even to middle class families, she said.

A state-sponsored study of the child care market found that in 2003, average weekly rates around Keene ranged from $105 for 3- to 5-year-olds to $134 for infants, the mid-range of prices for the state.

“I’ve been here four months, and I know of at least one resignation from someone who just couldn’t afford to put their kids in childcare,” said Renee Pecor, human resources manager for Timken Super Precision in Keene. “It was a single mom.”

All TANF recipients are eligible for a child care subsidy, but it’s often not enough to cover costs, said Terry R. Smith, director of the Division of Family Assistance at the state Department of Health and Human Services.

He said recipients pay an average of $75 out of their own pockets for child care, often for the sort of informal child care arrangements they use during off-peak hours or when a child gets sick and can’t go to his regular center.

Payments soon to rise by hundreds of dollars

On top of her child care subsidy, Downing pays about $160 for babysitters and $89 a month to the Keene Day Care Center, she said.

In June, her payments to the center will shoot up to $430 a month, she said. That’s a big chunk out of the $1,600 a month she’ll then be making, a third of which will go toward state subsidized rent for her four-bedroom public housing apartment, whose walls are covered in brightly colored children’s drawings.

She said she hopes she’ll find some help when she reauthorizes her other benefits in May. In addition to housing and child care assistance, she also gets food stamps.

None of that will solve next fall’s dilemma. She’s taking sociological theory and introduction to business, two required courses that will put her in class from 4:30 p.m. to 8:50 p.m. two days a week, she said.

She’s already thinking about child care.

She won’t find it at a center. There’s not a single one in the area that offers evening care. The Winchester Learning Center plans to eventually extend its hours until 11 p.m., but that won’t be for several years, said the nonprofit program’s executive director, Penelope R. Vane.

Fortunately, Downing’s job allows her the flexibility to take care of child care needs, she said.

Many local businesses help employees work around child-care problems through “family friendly” policies like flexible scheduling (see related story). But many low-income parents don’t have that luxury.

Piper Reason is a career counselor for Working Futures, an agency that contracts with the state to teach work readiness skills to TANF recipients.

Reason says her clients sometimes lose jobs or can’t take those offered to them because of child care issues.

Her clients are perfect candidates for entry-level retail jobs, and in the last three years about 1,400 jobs were created by the opening of Monadnock Marketplace. But most of those jobs require evening and weekend shifts, Reason said.

“The women I work with don’t have flexibility,” she said. “They’re looking at entry-level jobs. They can’t be asking for favors. They can’t be saying, ‘My child is more important than my job.’”

Panel seeking ways to help during off-hours

Reason is part of an ad hoc task force examining local child care needs, particularly the need for evening and weekend care.

The group isn’t certain what it will find, but might look to Caba Evening Care as a model solution, said Susan B. Newcomer, the workforce coordinator for the Greater Keene Area Chamber of Commerce, who is a member of the task force.

The center, which opened in Brattleboro last November, is the only program in the nation offering child care exclusively at night, said Patrick Moreland, executive director of Community Action Brattleboro Area, or CABA.

Housed in a former elementary school, it has space for 30 children and charges parents as little as $1 a week for care between 2 p.m. and midnight in its home-like setting, said center director Carol L. Ames. All parents are in low-income situations and must demonstrate the need for care, Moreland said.

It took three years of planning and a $600,000 renovation to open the center, which survives on a higher than average subsidy from the state, as well as private grants and donations, he said.

“It sapped my soul for three years, and now it exists and it’s helping,” Ames said. “That’s a very rewarding feeling, especially for something as unusual as this.”

Should a similar center open locally, it too would take years of planning and piles of cash, Newcomber said.

And though Downing will be in school until 2009, such a center would still be too late to help her.

She can dream, though. She’s heard that in Las Vegas, you can get 24-hour child care, even if your child is sick, she said.

“That would be my dream day care: 24-hour day care with a sick room, and then I think no single parent out there would have a reason not to work,” she said.