Lynchburg parents face limited options and high costs for child care, preschool

Elizabeth's Early Learning Center, a nonprofit child care center that serves infants to preschoolers, has a waitlist of 90 children, and it's growing.

The waitlist is so long, Jane Gerdy, the executive director said, that some people will call as soon as they learn they're pregnant.

"Some people tell us before they tell their families," she said. "'Don't tell anyone I'm pregnant, but please put me on the list.'"

Gerdy's story isn't uncommon in Lynchburg, where parents seeking child care often face waits and high prices.

Brittany Tweedy, a Lynchburg mother who works full time and attends school, said she's had a horrible time finding child care she could afford. After learning a local licensed provider would cost more than her monthly rent to get care for her 2-year-old daughter, Tweedy turned to family.

"It's just very, very, very tough," she said.

Right now, she's paying a family member to watch her daughter, and wishing her daughter could be with other kids her age.

"It's just a different experience versus having your child in day care, learning, being with other kids," she said. "I just really wish that I could have some type of assistance or just something affordable for her so she can experience that before she starts school, so she can experience what school would be like," she said.

Child care for infants in particular is scarce in Central Virginia, according to Director of the Child Care Resource Center at HumanKind Joan Rowe. She reviewed child care centers in Region 2000 - which comprises the city of Lynchburg and Bedford, Amherst, Appomattox and Campbell counties - and found only 35 licensed providers that serve infants. It's unclear how many unlicensed child care centers are operating in the region.

Seventeen, or about half, of the licensed providers responded to her email that asked how many infants they serve: 159, in total. So Rowe doubled this number to extrapolate the total number of child care slots for infants in the region: 318.

Rowe said there were 2,851 babies born in the region in 2015. That's nine times as many infants as there are spaces. The definition of a child care desert, Rowe said, is when there are more than three times as many children younger than age 5 as there are child care slots for those children.

"We're in a huge child care desert," she said, adding in all of Bedford County, there are only three licensed providers that can serve 22 infants in total.

Rowe attributes the shortage to the expense of maintaining a quality, licensed child care facility, especially for infants. The state-mandated ratio for infants is one teacher per four infants at all times. After children are 16 months old, the number of teachers can be reduced by half at nap time.

Those costs are reflected in tuition.In Lynchburg, for example, at Elizabeth's Early Learning Center, parents pay between $187 per week for infants and $151 per week for preschool-age children. Gerdy, the center's executive director, said the center loses money on infants. The Madison Heights Caterpillar Clubhouse charges $135 per week for infants and $100 per week for 2- and 3-year-olds. Demand is so great at EELC the center plans to build a new wing with four classrooms that would provide space for 36 children, on top of the 142 it already serves.

Ashley Graham, the director of HumanKind's Healthy Families, a home-visiting program, said the most "alarming" gap she sees in Lynchburg is the "lack of quality, affordable child care" for 2- and 3-year olds, such as Tweedy's daughter. There's no public option for children younger than 3, she noted.

Dr. Teresa Brennan, a developmental pediatrician at Centra, explained at a recent Poverty to Progress meeting that a child's development the year before kindergarten essentially predicts whether they will be reading on grade level by third grade, and that in turn predicts whether they will be successful for the rest of their school career. Poverty to Progress is the city's initiative to raise families out of poverty through a number of topic-based subgroups. Brennan leads the education subgroup dedicated to access to pre-K, preschool for 4-year-olds.

At the moment, public pre-K is far from universal. Out of 135 school divisions in Virginia, 120 have a state-funded pre-K program. Of those, 55 percent use 100 percent of the slots they receive funding for. Thirteen school divisions have 100 or more unused slots.

Lynchburg City Schools has a free pre-K program for 4-year-olds designed for low-income and otherwise disadvantaged families. Pam Thomas, LCS coordinator for early childhood and English language learners, said the Virginia Preschool Initiative provides enough funding for 239 pre-K students in Lynchburg, and Title I funds provide money to teach an additional 32. The LCS pre-K program had a wait list of 49 children as of Sept. 1, up from 35 in September 2016. Thomas said she doesn't foresee receiving additional funding from the state to take on more kids.

Head Start, another free option for 3- and 4-year-olds in low-income families, is funded by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and shares an application with LCS pre-K. Dolores Holmes, the director, said it has a waitlist of 53 children, which actually has decreased in recent years. She attributes this to Head Start's competition with LCS pre-K.

Debbie Wilson, a pre-K teacher at Carl B. Hutcherson School, badly wants to see an expansion of pre-K, both in terms of who qualifies and the sheer number of spots available.

"Honestly, all of these: quality day care, quality pre-K, it's going to take funding," she said. "If we could have solved this thing without money, somebody would have solved it before now."

The stakes are high for solving these child care shortages, Rowe said.

Without quality, affordable options, "people start looking for providers who are not licensed," she said.

Not all unlicensed providers are negligent, she said. Some follow state regulations. But some don't, simply because they're ignoring the regulations or because they don't know about them. That can result in catastrophes. She referenced a 2014 fire at an unlicensed day care on Ramsgate Lane in Lynchburg that killed two children as an example.

"[Unlicensed providers] may not have first aid/CPR [training]; they may not have training for medication administration," Rowe said. "It's unlikely that they're getting just the 16 hours of training that's required by the state. It's potentially a dangerous situation."

Rowe said either the government needs to step in and provide subsidies for quality, licensed child care, or businesses need to "step up and either put child care in their business or subsidize families who require child care."