How childcare shortages undermine rural communities

Candy Murnion remembers vividly the event that pushed her to open her first day care business in Jordan, a town of fewer than 400 residents in a sea of grassland in eastern Montana. This story also appeared in KFF Health News Garfield County’s public health nurse, one of few public health officials serving the town and nearly 5,000 square miles that surround it, had quit because she had given birth to her second child and couldn’t find day care. “My primary goal was to give families a safe place to take their children so they could work if th