Saturday, November 5, 2011
Public funds urged to improve day care centers
By Jacqueline Reis, TELEGRAM & GAZETTE STAFF
jreis@telegram.com
WORCESTER — Eileen M. Lavallee often tells parents who visit Webster Square Day Care Center, “We’re not pretty, but we have a lot of substance.”
Such is the case for many Massachusetts day care centers that, like Webster Square, serve low-income families, according to a recent report from the Children’s Investment Fund, a Boston-based organization that provides loan and grant financing, technical assistance and training to nonprofit early childhood education and out-of-school time centers.
They surveyed 73 randomly selected early childhood education centers and 57 out-of-school (such as after-school) centers statewide and found that: Only one site was fully handicapped accessible; only 15 percent of the programs were in space originally designed for that use; almost 70 percent of early childhood sites lacked classroom sinks; 65 percent of all sites lacked appropriate technology for teachers; 54 percent of early childhood centers lacked space and equipment for children to play physically indoors (known as gross motor space); and 22 percent of centers had elevated carbon dioxide levels, showing insufficient ventilation.
On Tuesday, the fund kicked off a statewide tour at the EcoTarium that advocates hope will drum up support for public financing of day care facilities.
“We need to expand the definition of quality to include the physical environment,” said Mav Pardee, director of the Children’s Investment Fund.
In Webster Square, the day care rooms in the basement of Aldersgate United Methodist Church were probably state of the art when they were built for that purpose in 1969, but they certainly aren’t now. Wood paneling is coming off the walls; the bathrooms, while renovated four years ago, are not adjacent to all of the classrooms and show their heavy use; the main door is usually unlocked, and a fire exit door in a classroom beside Main Street isn’t alarmed.
The bathroom renovations happened with help from Edward Street Child Services in Worcester and several partners, “but that’s just the tip of the iceberg,” Ms. Lavallee said at Tuesday’s event.
She was one of three local day care providers who spoke at Tuesday’s event. John Gardiner of Worcester Comprehensive Child Care Services spoke of his frustrations finding new space for day care facilities at Great Brook Valley, and Janet McKeag of the Elm Park Center for Early Childhood Education told of her difficulty and successes getting grants for renovations.
“Child care in itself is not a jazzy ask,” she said of her efforts to get grants.
The pre-K landscape is changing in Massachusetts, and advocates hope those changes will bring better facilities to early childhood centers. The state Department of Early Education and Care is implementing a quality rating and improvement system to assess day care, preschool and after-school settings, and facilities are one of five areas included. The state has also applied for federal money through the Race to the Top Early Learning challenge, and the Children’s Investment Fund hopes to use that attention to emphasize the importance of well-designed facility to student and teacher achievement.
At Webster Square, the only way to take care of all their facility needs would be to relocate to a new building, and that would be expensive, said Dianne Bruce, executive director of Edward Street Child Services. Even if they could raise the money to buy a new building, what the center really needs is an endowment to ensure that it will be able to maintain the facility, and it is difficult to get grants to build an endowment, Ms. Bruce said.
URL: http://www.telegram.com/article/20111105/NEWS/111059935/-1/NEWS04
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