Area
lacking infant daycare
Article published in the Bennington Banner
December 5, 2003
By John LeMay, Staff Writer
BENNINGTON - Care for infants and toddlers can be hard to find
in the county, and childcare centers are often forced to turn families
away, say professionals in the field.
“Folks are even calling us when they're pregnant, saying ‘I hear
it's hard to find care, should I start looking now?’” said
Linda Bennett of the Bennington County Childcare Association. “I
say ‘definitely, yes.’”
The last time she checked, there were no childcare vacancies for
children two years old and under, Bennett said. Childcare centers
and registered home-based childcare providers currently care for
about 250 children in the county, she said.
Childcare facilities typically have waiting lists, she said.
A key cause of the problem is that 75 percent of parents with
children under five are working parents, and they need to find
some way to provide care for their children, said Carol Barbierri,
director of the Happy Days Child Care Center in Arlington, which
has 115 children from newborn to school age.
A year ago, the center expanded to a new building in hopes that
it could handle all the applicants, Barbierri said.
“We expanded from eight slots to 23 slots for children zero to
three years old. We’re pretty much full,” she said. “We thought
that it would take five years to fill those slots. It took a year.”
Another cause of the problem is economic and logistical, said
Diane Wiles, director of the Oak Hill Children’s Center in Pownal.
The government requires one teacher to every four infants and
toddlers, and only one teacher to every 10 preschool-aged children,
Wiles said.
Requirements for grant money may demand an even smaller ratio
for infants and toddlers, Wiles said.
So a class of preschoolers pays the teachers’ salaries more readily
than a class of infants and toddlers.
If the numbers are down in a preschool class, it can absorb the
cost, but if the numbers are down in an infant-toddler class, it's
a deficit, Wiles said.
“It’s hard to offer (infant-toddler care). If the room isn’t full,
you can’t pay staff. It’s not because people don’t want to,” Wiles
said.
Even if there’s a waiting list, there’s a lag time in filling
openings, she said.
“It’s all about the ratio. You can’t open more rooms, the preschoolers
are funding those rooms,” Wiles said.
The alternative of crowding four teachers and 16 infants and toddlers
into a room isn’t attractive either, she said.
It usually takes grant money to keep an infant-toddler program
going, Wiles said.
Barbierri said the state has recognized the problem and is taking
at least some steps toward dealing with it: “The state is giving
money to people to expand their slots.”
But the problem persists.
“It’s really hard. That was the whole reason we build this new
building, so we wouldn’t have to turn people away, and now we
are again,” Barbierri said.
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