Local child care facilities face serious challenges

By Steven Marinos

Photo by Steven Marinos

The Montessori Center for Children offers full-time daycare and preschool for a number of Rockbridge families

Local experts warn that the child care situation in Rockbridge County could be headed toward “crisis level.”

Dr. Leslie Cintron, assistant professor of sociology at Washington & Lee University, recently authored an in-depth report on the status of child care facilities in Rockbridge County. In it, she and her students thoroughly examined each of the local offerings

Cintron and her researchers uncovered a dichotomy in the child care available here. “There’s some very good quality, relatively high-cost child care in the local area, and then there is good quality subsidized child care in the local area for people who are under a certain low-income level,” she said.

“Parents who can afford to pay for the high quality care and the parents who can afford to qualify for the high quality care that’s offered to individuals and families with low incomes are doing okay. It’s the families in the middle who may be spending up to 28 percent of their income on child care.”

But the problems don’t end there. Availability is another key issue with child care facilities in Rockbridge County.

Outside of normal working hours, there is no licensed child care available in the county whatsoever. “There is absolutely nothing that is licensed that is available to them,” Cintron says. “Nothing.”

As a result, parents must choose between sending their children to unlicensed family care facilities and relying on a friend or relative to watch over their children while they are at work.

Nan Partlett, director of the Yellow Brick Road Early Learning Center, expressed concern about the quality of such unlicensed facilities.

“There are some unregulated family settings within the county which concern me, because we have no regulation there. We don’t even know the numbers of children who are going there. If you are in a licensed child care facility, then you will have ratios of teacher to child, you have a diet that has been carefully thought about, you have educational activities during the day… So it is very important that families can find center-based care, I think.”

Cintron agrees. “When you’re out in the family care situation – where people are taking care of children within their homes – it could be wonderful in a very loving and nurturing environment that’s educationally sound and safe, but it could be something else as well, which doesn’t look like that and could be very unsafe, and that’s what we’re finding: People who work in the non-standard work hour schedules are the ones who are having a big difficulty in locating good, quality care.”

Licensing, of course, comes at a cost. “To get licensing is actually quite a long and pretty arduous process,” Cintron says. The difficulty involved in acquiring and maintaining its license is often reflected in the cost of a center-based facility.

To help combat costs and allow local families to utilize their services, facilities like Yellow Brick Road employ a sliding scale for tuition, and work year-round to establish scholarships for families in need. This year, in fact, nearly 70 percent of YBR’s families received assistance.

Cintron fears that more work needs to be done. She points out that Washington and Lee is preparing to hire about 20 new faculty members, most of whom will likely look to the community for their child care needs.

And it is within the community, she says, that the solution lies.

“I think one of the things that we really need to do in this community is to get together sort of a task force to really look at this issue and to collaborate on this issue because it will require a community solution.”

Partlett, too, believes that an open dialog about child care in the community is important.

“I’m delighted with the conversation right now about child care,” she says. “We’re caring about it. We’re talking about it. I think the time is here that maybe we can really take the next step and ensure our families quality care.”

Cintron acknowledges the importance of dialog, but urges community members to go one step further. “We really do need more unity in talking to one another,” she argues. “We are all thinking about these issues, but not necessarily collaboratively.”

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Produced by Washington and Lee journalism students.

Lead supervisor:      Prof. Claudette Artwick

Reporting supervisor: Prof. Doug Cumming

Editing supervisor:  Prof. Pamela Luecke

Technical supervisor:  Michael Todd