In an English class for adults in the southwestern Minnesota city of Marshall, about 10 people hailing from other countries are learning about American customs while practicing their grammar and pronunciation. Many of them are here to prepare for the workforce.

Teacher Stacy Abraham leads the class in reciting a paragraph rife with errors that students are tasked with fixing.

Meanwhile, Leonardo Silva is crawling between desks while sucking on his own fingers.

In his defense, he’s just 1 year old.

His mom, Brazilian immigrant Kezya Silva, tried her best during the Thursday morning class to focus on her work while she wrangled him. At one point, she had to take a break from writing notes to breastfeed him.

Besides needing to learn English, Silva is facing another obstacle, one that many other workers in Marshall share: finding affordable childcare.

“Because of my son, I’m not working,” Silva said. “I don’t have anyone to leave him with.”

She’s not alone.

“We have folks that would be in the workforce if they had available and affordable childcare, but that's a shortage that we have,” said Mayor Bob Byrnes. “We do have several childcare centers … but there's still a much larger need.”

Over the last 15 years, Marshall’s labor force — the number of people who have a job or are looking for one — has been declining, down 11.1 percent from 2010. During the same time period, Minnesota’s labor force grew by 7.8 percent.

At the Minnesota Department of Employment and Economic Development, where analysts crunch these numbers, there’s no precise explanation.

“There's a huge variety of factors, just like everything,” said Luke Greiner, one of DEED’s regional analysts. “It'd be nice if there was a tidy smoking gun that we could all figure out how to solve.”

It might not be immediately noticeable in the city. Marshall has many small and large businesses, and in August, the city’s unemployment rate was 4.7 percent, slightly lower than the statewide rate.

But the unemployment rate doesn’t include people who have stopped looking for a job altogether. And on the ground in Marshall, many residents said people are staying home because of the difficulty of finding affordable childcare.

Why childcare is hard to find in Marshall

A 2025 report funded by the state of Minnesota estimated that the Marshall area has a shortage of more than 400 childcare spots.

MPR News spoke to three childcare providers in Marshall. All were at or near capacity and said increasing costs, staffing issues and burdensome regulations have strangled supply.

“My waiting list is long, and I'm at capacity for everything,” said Michele Gregoire, owner of Stepping Stones Childcare and Preschool. “I don’t have any openings till ‘28.”

Infant care is the most constrained because there’s high demand to get children into a center early. But it’s also the least profitable because it requires the highest adult-to-child ratio: 1 adult for every 4 infants.

“It doesn't pay in the infant room enough to support that teacher,” said Kari Dahl Condezo, who runs the independent childcare center at Southwest Minnesota State University in Marshall.

That means the other age groups are already helping subsidize infant care and there’s little incentive to expand, despite how important infant care is to clients and the business itself.

“Typically at a center, the families start as an infant with the program, and they typically never leave,” Dahl Condezo said. “They grow with you and they become part of your family because they keep having, typically, more children.”

And some Minnesota programs that reduce the demand for childcare can have a disproportionate effect on supply, according to Karen DeBoer, who is director of nonprofit Child Care Aware in southwestern Minnesota.

For example, Minnesota has expanded its voluntary prekindergarten program, which offers free preschool to some children. That reduction in demand can hurt childcare providers since they can’t afford to operate with just a few students.

“I have to replace my furniture. I have to have equipment. I have to have materials. I have to have supplies,” DeBoer said. “My expenses don't change overall just because I have six fewer children every day, and for a childcare center, they're having difficulty finding staff willing to work for the wages they're able to pay.”

If they raise those wages, childcare becomes even less accessible.

“The more families have to pay, the more they're going to opt for those cheaper options, and the fewer children that are enrolled in programs,” she said. “It’s just this vicious cycle.”

If the lack of childcare is contributing to the decline in the labor force, it’s also affected by it. Staffing qualified employees was already hard to do and other state policies have made that tougher, according to childcare providers.

While Minnesota's paid leave program may be a boon for workers looking to care for their child at home, it's a headache for many business owners who now need to be able to fill staffing gaps when a worker takes leave.

For childcare providers, that means finding someone with specialized education and training.

“If somebody were to come to you and ask if you wanted to open up another center, the answer would be no, because you can't find staffing,” Gregoire said. “We need it. Marshall needs it. But where are we going to put it? Where are we going to get the staff?”

Another option is family-run, home-based childcare. But providers said complicated regulations have made those harder to run.

“These family care providers, they're just missing,” Greiner said. “We had way more of them before. They've been on a fairly steady decline, and that is a challenge in rural areas because you typically have a larger share of your child care at family-based care versus centers.”

Marshall’s shifting demographics

Changes to the makeup of Marshall’s population may be another reason the labor force is falling.

Marshall is older than it used to be. According to Census data, 11.4 percent of Marshall residents were at least 65 years old in 2010. The latest estimates put that figure at 17.1 percent.

“Our baby boomer population has more or less phased into retirement age,” Greiner said.

And those trends are affecting the childcare industry, too.

“A lot of the family child care (providers) that have closed in Marshall have been a good amount of providers that have been retiring,” said Kim Swalboski, owner of Canoga Park Childcare. “They've been doing it for a long time and finally reached that age, and you just don't have enough new providers, like younger providers, that are entering the field.”

Immigration is part of the reason why, despite an aging population, Marshall’s population has continued to grow.

But immigrants face barriers from entering the labor market, said Greiner, with the state’s economic development department. So even with a higher population, there may be fewer total people actively working or looking for work.

For instance, it is harder to find a job without a high school degree or English proficiency, which foreign-born workers are less likely to have.

“Those two pieces, they serve as a gate to the broader economy,” Greiner said. “If you don't have that GED or high school diploma, those people are basically competing against high school students.”

Adult Basic Education services are available statewide to help people develop skills such as English and math at no cost. Stacy Abraham teaches one of those English classes in Marshall out of Southwest Minnesota State University.

In her eight years teaching there, she estimates she’s helped more than 200 students reach their goals, whether that be getting a specific job certification, a degree or just English proficiency.

Almost all of her students are immigrants, including many refugees, and the classes are grant-funded and offered at no cost.

“In society we don't have that help for people that … have the abilities, they just need a little bit of help,” she said. “It's really fun to just help people and especially people who feel like they're not good at something, or you know, ‘I'm just never going to make it.’”

One of her students, May Htoo, has been learning English for just a few weeks. He said he’s been in the country for 15 years but moved to Marshall this year after being laid off from a job in South Dakota. Now, he’s learning English to help himself get another job.

And Kezya Silva, who brought her son to class, moved to the U.S. last year and started learning English earlier this year.

Abraham said she’s doing very well in the class, even though she mostly attends online. Technology can often be a barrier for other students, but not for her. She uses an AI translator to help her in class, and her pronunciation is advanced compared to other students.

Her goal is to get a job next year, but for now, that’s out of reach.

“On Zoom, she'll mute because her baby is talking or needs something,” Abraham said. “She's like, ‘Oh sorry, teacher.’ I’m like ‘It’s OK, it’s fine! You need to take care of your kid.’”

Marshall’s future

Greiner, with the state’s economic development department, said he’s broadly optimistic about the economy of rural regions like southwestern Minnesota.

“It doesn't take much imagination to wonder, ‘Is the hardest parts of decline behind us?’ he said. “The way I see the region, I see the past, which is not a lot of positive for some of this stuff. And in the future … we have projected population stability, projected job growth. Even though it's real slow, it's not decline.”

He said these communities have a lot to offer, such as valuable land and thriving industries. Marshall itself is a regional hub; Mayor Byrnes estimates that the town’s population nearly doubles during the day as people drive to the city to work at places like Avera Medical Group, Turkey Valley Farms and Southwest Minnesota State University.

And while the town’s labor force numbers haven’t recovered, they’ve at least leveled off in the last couple of years.

“It's too early to say it's part of a trend,” Greiner said. “It's just hard to believe that it would go to zero.”

Special thanks to Danger Boat Productions and the Minnesota Humanities Center for their Sketches of Minnesota events around the state that helped inform this report.

Collected from Minnesota Public Radio News. View original source here.