FORT WAYNE — When Sarah Plasterer had twins three years ago, her parents moved from Michigan to watch the babies while she and her husband worked.
Then, Plasterer found out she was pregnant again. “I was terrified to tell them,” said the Fort Wayne mother. “I’m 40 years old crying to my husband because I’m gonna have to tell my parents that I’m pregnant.”
Asking her parents to watch three kids under 3 years old felt like too much. But the Plasterers had no idea how they could afford daycare, which can cost more than $300 a week per child in Allen County.
“We have things that we could cut out,” said Derek Plasterer, 42, who teaches high school. “But I mean, I’ll be honest — we’re paycheck to paycheck.”
Then, the Plasterers got some other big news: Sarah Plasterer’s job would soon begin helping families pay for daycare.
Indiana’s childcare system is at a pivotal moment. The state cut the voucher program for low-income families over the past two years, freezing enrollment and reducing payments to providers. With fewer students and less public aid, many childcare providers have closed their doors — limiting options for all families. Even middle-class parents often struggle to find reliable care they can afford.
Find out more
Northeast Indiana Early Childhood Coalition administers Tri-Share+ and Co-Share.
Tri-Share+ details:
- Employers and employees must be based in the 11 participating counties — Adams, Allen, DeKalb, Huntington, Kosciusko, LaGrange, Noble, Steuben, Wabash, Wells, Whitley.
- Families must make under 400% of the federal poverty level or just under $155,000 for a family of five.
- Children must be 0-5.
- Reimbursements are capped based on state childcare payment rates.
Co-Share details:
- Not limited to the 11-county region.
- Businesses can set eligibility rules.
Interested employers can find out more here. Employees at participating companies can also learn more from the coalition.
Now, state leaders say childcare affordability is a priority — and they are looking to employers to share the cost. But it remains unclear how much Indiana’s Republican-controlled legislature is willing to spend or how many businesses are willing to take on a new benefit.
In Northeast Indiana, a regional early childhood coalition is testing one version of that public-private approach. Tri-Share+, which began in 2025, divides daycare costs evenly among parents, employers and the public.
Backers hope the pilot can support families, keep employees in the workforce, stabilize daycare providers — and ultimately become a model for the state.
Stillwater Hospice, where Sarah Plasterer works as a billing specialist, is one of about 20 employers involved in the program. As of August, 148 children were participating.
Tri-Share+ is designed to serve families who make too much to qualify for state childcare vouchers but still struggle to afford reliable care, said Allie Sutherland, executive director of the Northeast Indiana Early Childhood Coalition, which runs the pilot.
Focusing on the Fort Wayne region has allowed advocates to slowly build support for helping with employee childcare from businesses, Sutherland said.
“It’s a hearts and minds shift,” Sutherland said. “Employers very much care about their employees, but they’re figuring out — how do we do this? Does this make sense?”
Keeping parents in the workforce
Kelsey Weil, 33, used to work with Sarah Plasterer at Stillwater — before the company joined Tri-Share+. Weil liked her job in fundraising, and when she had a baby three years ago, she planned to continue working.
But the cost of daycare felt out of reach for her family. Going back to work, “just unfortunately didn’t make much sense,” said Weil, who quit her job to stay home with her daughter.
Her husband, a lineman for a power company, took on more hours at work.
The Northeast Indiana Early Childhood Coalition estimates that more than 7,000 parents in the Fort Wayne region would return to work if they had childcare. When parents step out of the workforce, it’s not only costly for families. It’s also a burden for employers, which must hire and train replacements.
At Stillwater Hospice, where the workforce is overwhelmingly women, finding affordable childcare is one of the top challenges facing staff, said Jon Tyler, director of human resources.
When workers have precarious care, they are less reliable themselves, he said. “They might want to work, but if there’s no backup plan for childcare, they can’t work.”
Stillwater has about 180 employees, including nurses, health aides and hospice workers who visit patients in their homes, Tyler said. Because workers are spread out across the region, opening an on-site center or subsidizing care at a specific facility doesn’t make sense.
With Tri-Share+, parents can choose their own childcare as long as it’s a licensed home or center, registered ministry, or school-based program.
“That really opened us up to being able to offer it across the board,” Tyler said. “It made a lot of sense for us.”
Three Stillwater staffers are part of Tri-Share+.
Making the case to businesses
Tri-Share began in Michigan five years ago, and as of June, just over 1,000 children participate — a tiny slice of the families who need help paying for care. States including North Carolina, Missouri and Kentucky have launched similar programs. But they tend to serve small numbers of children.
Critics argue programs will remain small because not enough employers want to pay for it.
Sherry Searles has seen some of that reluctance firsthand in Kosciusko County. Searles leads LaunchPad, an initiative housed in the Kosciusko Chamber of Commerce that aims to improve early childhood education.
The community is in the Tri-Share+ region, but no Kosciusko County-based businesses have signed on yet, Searles said.
“They think it’s a bottomless pit,” Searles said. “They feel like, ‘If I do this, I’m in this forever. I can’t shut this off.’”
LaunchPad is making the case to businesses that they can start slowly, Searles said. “You can set parameters around this. You can say, ‘we’re only going to spend X amount of dollars.’”
One thing that makes the program attractive to some participating businesses is that the Northeast Indiana Early Childhood Coalition handles the management, such as ensuring employees are eligible.
Employers deduct employees’ share of tuition from their paychecks and send it, along with the employer contribution, to the coalition. The coalition then pays daycare providers directly.
“Our administration is almost nothing,” said Denise Reeb, who works in human resources for Sauder Manufacturing Co. “That makes it really, really great.”
The company participates in Tri-Share+ and Co-Share, a similar program the coalition offers for cases when businesses or employees are not eligible for the matching grant funding. Co-Share allows companies to set their own guidelines around who is eligible and how much they contribute. It’s not restricted to the 11-county Tri-Share+ region.
In both cases, employers decide how much to budget for subsidies.
“I’ve been in situations where you’re living check to check,” Reeb said. If the company can help stabilize workers’ lives, they are happier, more productive workers, she said.
At the same time, Reeb said, “We aren’t losing people and having that high turnover cost.”
Winning state support — and funding
Indiana’s long-strained childcare system has attracted new attention over the past two years. The state used temporary federal pandemic aid to expand vouchers that help low-income parents. When that money ran out, Indiana cut vouchers, and many childcare providers closed their doors.
State leaders — including Gov. Mike Braun — responded this spring by infusing $200 million in emergency funding into the voucher system. But that will only fund vouchers for about 14,000 children, leaving thousands in need. The legislature would need to allocate long-term funding to sustain the new vouchers.
Braun has continued to tout his support for daycare and preschool. In an email, spokesperson Griffin Reid said “child care affordability will be one of the top issues to address in the upcoming session.”
The Northeast Indiana Tri-Share+ pilot is funded with a nearly $5 million grant from the state-funded regional strategic development commission. It is expected to run through 2028.
Tri-Share+ supporters hope the focus on childcare affordability will translate to state funding in the Fort Wayne region and other communities. But that remains a difficult ask in Indiana’s legislature.
“Historically, open-ended expenditures have not been very popular within the legislature,” said Sen. Kyle Walker (R-Lawrence), who helped create a tax credit for businesses that support childcare. “They become a line item within the budget that is very difficult to roll back.”
Walker, who is not running for reelection, believes that new or expanded childcare tax credits — including potential credits for parents — could be more likely to gain traction in the legislature.
Stitching together care
Being part of the Tri-Share+ pilot has been life-changing for the Plasterer family. With the help of the program, the two-year-old twins Adalyn and Macklin enrolled in a nearby church-run preschool while their grandparents watched their baby brother.
Educators at the Crescent Avenue Weekday School soon noticed that Macklin struggled to communicate. That flag led to months of speech therapy, and earlier this year, he received surgery to remove his tonsils and adenoids and insert ear tubes, Sarah Plasterer said.
Macklin used to wake up screaming in the middle of the night several times a week, Sarah Plasterer said. “It made me feel like a failure as a mom, you know, because you want to help your child, but you can’t.”
After the surgery, Macklin started sleeping fine and speaking more clearly, she said.
The twins — who are now three — will soon move to a new school. Crescent Avenue is closing its doors permanently this week.
In a letter to parents, the school said that it was forced to close by financial pressures, including cuts to state childcare vouchers and low enrollment.
The Plasterers found another nearby preschool. Tri-Share+ will continue to help them pay.
“It allows me to focus more at work,” Sarah Plasterer said. “I don’t have to worry because I know that they’re being taken care of.”
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FPI News reporter Dylan Peers McCoy covers pressing issues throughout the state and how local communities are tackling those challenges. Reach her at 508-259-4809 or dylan.mccoy@fpinews.org.
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