Promises, Promises

While reading about childcare on the web, I came across these two articles.

No matter what corner of the world we are talking about, the last possible seating is for the child.

If you look at public education, the last consideration is the child - not the first. Did you ever see a walk out of teachers because of curriculum?

"We just don't have room for a column on children," quotes award winning Editor Bruce Baumann, "It's a financial decision and one we are not likely to change."

How many churches scream from the pulpit that families and children are our business our only business, and then grab the purse strings and run in the other direction?


Been there and seen it -

Archdiocese Puts Day Care Center in Dire Straits Boston MA
By Kimberly Atkins

Parents and officials at a popular Waltham day-care center said they will soon be without a place to care for the tots after Archdiocese of Boston officials suddenly reneged on a deal to rent them space.

The move also leaves the Little Souls Center for Children out more than $6,000 spent preparing to get the space up to code. But most importantly, they said, if they don't find new accommodations, the center will be forced to close, leaving dozens of kids and parents with nowhere to go.

``The thought of losing Little Souls is devastating,'' said Toby Fisher, whose 3-year-old son, Nicholas, is one of 114 children enrolled. ``They bring out the best in each child.''

In a statement, archdiocese spokesman Terry Donilon said the scope of needed renovations was too extensive and would limit the future uses of the building if Little Souls left the property.

``Father (Rodney) Copp and his parish are working incredibly hard to (cut costs) while continuing to meet the overall needs of the parish community,'' the statement said, adding that no lease was signed.

The center is currently located in a Lyman Street building connected with the now-closed St. Joseph's Church and has been renting that space from the archdiocese. After learning the building would be sold, parish officials at nearby St. Charles Borromeo Church offered to rent its rectory building, center director Jocelyn Wolfe said.

But after a year of spending more than $6,000 on contractors and architects to assess how to ready the rectory space, and giving church officials an estimate of more than $150,000 of work that needs to be done, Little Souls learned the deal fell through last month - leaving folks at the center scrambling to find a new home by October.

``Right now, we are asking everybody for help,'' Wolfe said, adding that there are few other option for working parents. Little Souls always had waiting lists. ``We have a meeting with the mayor coming up. We need a building.''


Family Care Center to Close Richmond, VA
by Bill Lohmann


The greatest loves of our lives inspire the greatest passion, which in part explains the tumult over the projected closing of Grace & Holy Trinity Child Care Center.
The old house with the crayon picket fence in the 1600 block of Floyd Avenue has become an institution over the years, treasured and appreciated by the hundreds of families it has served.

"The center is more than a child-care center," said Tom Illmensee, a former teacher at the center and now a parent of children at the preschool. "It's a symbol in the city. It's a place where love and diversity and compassion and young children thrive. The city desperately needs that. I think even people who don't have children want that type of place in their city."

But the center's days may be numbered as its namesake and primary benefactor, Grace & Holy Trinity Episcopal Church, has decided after 40 years the preschool is no longer financially viable. The church has promised to provide funding through the end of the year but not beyond that, which means the center could close as soon as the end of August. The school year begins in September.

Parents and staff members feel blindsided and abandoned; church officials feel they have been unfairly castigated after years of generous support for making a reasonable, if difficult, business decision. The three dozen children enrolled, ages 2½-6, just sense that something's up.

Parents are desperately trying to come up with a way to save the place, talking about sales and solicitations and even auctioning stuff on eBay. Even a competitor, Susan Corbett, director of Second Presbyterian Church Child Care Center, mourns the potential loss of Grace & Holy Trinity's center as "really, really sad."

"Something really special has been destroyed," she said, "and it does not have to happen."

To understand the depth of feeling people have for the center, you must know what kind of place it is. Lots of child-care centers try to create a family atmosphere, but it's hard to imagine any achieving it as successfully as does Grace & Holy Trinity.

That it is in an old home helps, but most of the credit belongs to the staff -- vastly underpaid, as child-care workers generally are, but never under-appreciated for creating such a caring and creative environment. They love the place, too.

Director Cassandra Strand has worked there 21 years, assistant director Tom Applegate, a decade. Maintenance man Tony Clark, who comes in every night to clean, has kept the building humming for 15 years and has come to adore it, often using his own money to buy light bulbs, air filters and the sand that covers the backyard playground but sometimes migrates indoors in pockets, shoes and tiny hands.

"I've removed tons of sand from this building," he said with a smile at an emergency meeting of parents and staff members last week.

Children are treated as family and taught not only rudimentary academic skills to prepare them for kindergarten but also respect and responsibility. Over the years, the center has grown into a true melting pot, attracting children of various races, religions and economic backgrounds, urban dwellers and suburbanites. They are all the same in one regard, though: Their parents were lucky to find this place.

I know this because I'm one of those parents. Our oldest child attended Grace & Holy Trinity many years ago. It's difficult to describe how hard it was to find a center where we felt comfortable leaving our daughter every day. I can tell you this: We looked a lot. As soon as we walked onto the porch of Grace & Holy Trinity and through the front door, we knew we were home.

I revisited the center last week and stood among the pink and teal and polka-dotted walls. One of the lasting memories I have from our daughter's two years there was this: She didn't like butter on her toast, so Maggie the Cook, a friendly fixture in the kitchen for many years, happily served her toast without butter. It was a small thing, but it made a child happy. Small things can do that.

The same week word came down that the center might be closing, our daughter graduated from high school. We made it, but the current families appear to be left in the lurch with less than two months' notice to find comparable quality child care and not just a place where they feel like they're parking their kids.

Future generations won't know what they missed.

But no matter how good and noble a child-care center is, it cannot exist apart from the real world. Lights and water and building repairs, salaries and insurance are real, and bills come due.

Recent church-commissioned studies, said William Broaddus, senior warden of the church's governing vestry, concluded it is "simply economically unfeasible" to continue operating the child-care center in an aging building that limits enrollment to 40. Expanding in a new facility or merging with another program were among options ultimately ruled out.

"This is not an action the vestry grappled with easily," said Broaddus, a former Virginia attorney general. "There was a lot of angst. It's an operation we've been very proud of."

The church opened the center 40 years ago next week (July 6, 1965) as an outreach mission for families in Oregon Hill. When the Downtown Expressway was built in the 1970s, the center was displaced and moved to Floyd Avenue.

It earned accreditation from the National Academy of Early Childhood Programs and built a reputation that attracted families from all over.

"Which doesn't mean we no longer support the center," said Broaddus, "but the original mission changed somewhat."

Over the years, the church has supported the center with hundreds of thousands of dollars through the vestry budget ($25,000 was earmarked for the center for the current year), a separate endowment and annual sales of plum pudding prepared by church members.

In recent years, the financial imbalance between revenues and expenditures grew, Broaddus said. He cited a number of factors: other child-care alternatives, many of which accept infants; the aging facility that, unlike many church-run day-cares, is not at the church itself; and, in general, the rising costs of doing business while trying to keep tuition reasonable (currently $130 per week). Enrollment, too, hasn't always been at capacity in recent years, although 36 students are now enrolled, Strand said.

In the end, the church decided it was time to throw its support behind other, as-yet-determined, outreach ministries, Broaddus said. No decision has been made on what to do with the building, which has become a valuable piece of real estate in an escalating housing market in the Fan District.

The church underwent a leadership change when the Rev. W. Hill Brown III retired in 2001 after 38 years as rector and the Rev. Bollin M. Millner Jr. was hired as his replacement two years later. Speculation quietly grew about the future of the center, reaching a flashpoint last summer when longtime director Betty Garrett, the soul of the program, became frustrated by what she felt was a lack of support from the church and resigned after 25 years.

"I knew all of the battles I'd fought all these years," Garrett said the other day. "I couldn't fight them anymore."

So now parents have set up a task force to come up with a miracle to save the place or at least get a delay -- which might also take a miracle. The church's Broaddus said stretching out the last goodbye is not likely.

"We've studied this and studied it and we don't see any reason to delay the decision," he said.

Here's hoping the two sides can come to some understanding. Even if it doesn't save the center, maybe it could in some way preserve the respect, dignity and compassion of a place where children have always been taught, above all else, the importance of being kind to one another.