About half the backpack cubbies in the pre-kindergarten classroom of the GoldbergBerdais Child Development Center in Westwood are empty.
Eighteen months ago, the not-for-profit child care center had a waiting list. Now it has 20 openings, with some families it once served no longer able to afford to keep their children in the program even on the income-based sliding payment scale that the donation-fed center offers.
Enrollment also has declined at the two Am-Tree Child Care Center locations in Montvale, where about a dozen of the 150 families served have come to owner Mary Napolitano in recent months to say they’ve suffered job losses and can’t afford to keep their children enrolled full-time.
“It’s very hard,” Napolitano said. “If it’s a child who has been with us for a number of years, we would like to see them be able to remain and graduate with their class.”
But apart from offering a family a short grace period to see if they can get back on their feet quickly, or extending the option to keep their child enrolled part-time, there’s little that many child care center operators can do to help struggling families.
“You can be a little flexible,” Napolitano said. But her supply costs have increased and she can’t afford to give her teachers raises, “so at some point I have to ask how flexible I can afford to be,” she said.
It’s not surprising that the country’s economic troubles have spread into the child care industry. If parents lose jobs or have their work hours reduced, it isn’t long before they have trouble paying the average annual cost of keeping an infant or preschooler enrolled full time in a child care center, which in Bergen County ranges from $10,000 to $12,500 and in Passaic County ranges from $8,500 to $10,700.
Without traditional child care, some parents have trouble securing new jobs, while others turn to looser child care arrangements, shuffling their kids among relatives and friends, or deciding to let older children stay home alone after school lets out, said Linda Smith, executive director of the National Association of Child Care Resource and Referral Agencies.
The trend is too new to track with hard statistics. But here in New Jersey, the officials who make referrals and help dole out child care assistance funds are beginning to hear some similar reports.
“We are getting a lot more calls from child care centers to let us know they have openings and need referrals,” said Nancy Thomson, executive director of Child Care Connection, an agency that manages the state’s child care referral network.
At the same time, the agencies, which help administer child care subsidies to low-income families, say they’ve seen funds cut off to growing numbers of parents whose work hours were reduced to fewer than 30 a week, making them ineligible to receive assistance. Thomson’s agency plans to lobby state and federal officials for some relaxing of the eligibility standards, arguing parents will find it hard to return to work or increase their hours later if they lose the subsidies they need to pay for child care.
Many parents who’ve lost jobs have begun asking child care centers for flexible hours, and more centers are deciding to honor those requests, said Linda Kriegel, director of the Bergen County Office for Children.
“We’ve told some parents we’ll let them bring their child just one day a week if that’s all they can afford so they can have at least that one day to look for a new job,” said Sandy Richards, director of the Turrelle Child Care and Early Learning Center of Paramus.
The Turrelle Center, operated by the non-profit Children’s Aid and Family Services agency, serves low-income, middle-class and upper-middle-class families and is hearing tales of woe from families who fall into all categories.
When parents are forced to pull children out of centers, their children miss out on the preschool education and valuable socialization that come with a formal child care center setting, points out Frances DiPaola, executive director of the GoldbergBerdais Center.
“These days kids have to be able to hit the ground running when they get to kindergarten,” said DiPaola. “If they haven’t had any socialization or exposure to a classroom setting, they’re going to have a hard time adjusting later on.”
Another looming concern is that most child care centers operate on a thin revenue margin and have little financial cushion to weather tough times.
In addition to the cost of unfilled spots, part-time placements can be a strain on centers because it’s hard to recoup money needed to pay teachers’ full-time salaries. And even before the downturn, many centers were already struggling to pay the cost of new environmental studies the state began requiring two years ago.
As yet, there hasn’t been a rash of child care center closings in North Jersey, local officials say. Child care advocates worry, however, that smaller, independently owned centers won’t survive a long recession.
“Then you have to ask, ‘When the economy starts to come back, will the child care structure be gutted?’Ÿ” Smith said.