ASK ELi: Near-Campus Daycare Center Squeeze?

Image: Lori Strom, MSU’s Family Resource Center Coordinator

Before Council voted 3 to 2 to close the daycare at the Bailey Community Center, parents of that daycare's children and their allies said that this would have a detrimental effect on families who live and work downtown and on campus. To try to find out what the effect has been in some quantitative terms, I talked to Lori Strom, MSU’s Family Resource Center Coordinator.

Strom has been in her current position for 18 years, and serves as an advocate for MSU students, faculty, and staff with families. She is one of the few people in town with a global view of daycare in East Lansing, although it is important to note that many of the families she serves are not residents of East Lansing. (As some proponents of the closure noted, a minority of the families at the Bailey daycare are East Lansing residents, which means that as long as East Lansing taxpayers are subsidizing the daycare, they are subsidizing families who are not fellow taxpayers in East Lansing.)

I asked Strom: What’s the impact of the closure of the Bailey daycare from your office’s perspective?

Strom answered: “The East Lansing area and MSU campus community will see a void of approximately 60 licensed childcare spaces when Bailey closes. This community already suffers from a lack of infant, toddler, and preschool spaces. There are licensed home providers in the area who care for young children, so they can make up the gap.” These are people who are licensed to provide childcare in the provider’s home.

“But,” Strom says, “when I ask parents about preferences as to use of centers or home daycares, 85% say they prefer centers. The home providers are equally qualified as licensed providers, but the parents tend to look for centers, so the Bailey closure will create a big void in the MSU community.”

Strom says that “there is already a shortage” of daycare center spots in town, and that losing the infant and toddler spaces at Bailey will be “especially hard.” According to Strom, “In the entire East Lansing zip code area, the only centers that provide infant spaces are Appletree, Peoples Church Preschool, Bailey, Kindercare, and Spartan Child Development Center. That’s why typically there are long waiting lists of over a year in most places.”

Eastminster Child Development used to take infants, but no longer does. That means that in terms of spaces near campus or downtown, families who want center-style daycare are limited to Bailey, Peoples Church, and Spartan Child Development. According to Strom, “When we assess local center-based childcare spaces, [we find] a significant lack of infant and toddler spaces available near campus.”

Strom explains: “If you look at the number of children affiliated with MSU, you can see the problem. In last study, done in 1993, it was projected that we had approximately 12,000 children affiliated with the campus, including infants through children twelve years of age. How can we possibly meet that kind of need when we have only ten infant spaces on campus at the Spartan Child Development Center?”

Strom also notes that Bailey’s location has often been more convenient for MSU-affiliated parents than the on-campus daycare, because Spartan Child Development Center is on the south side of the tracks, and many families live north of the tracks.

According to Strom, while “the Bailey program had been fairly affordable,” it costs over $13,000 per year to have an infant cared for at the Spartan Child Development Center. This, she notes, was one reason the Bailey parents' group had proposed to Council a plan for raising rates substantially—because caring for infants is very expensive in terms of labor and equipment when you correctly follow childcare regulations.

In an effort to help lower-income families, the MSU Family Resource Center has had a childcare grant called SpartanKids, which provides for low-income MSU students. That grant has been subsidizing three spaces for infant, toddler and preschool-aged children at the Bailey daycare. Strom is now having to work to find new spots for those low-income students’ children. She explains, “We will have to move these three spaces from Bailey to other licensed providers that provide high quality care that is either nationally accredited or have a high ranking from the Michigan Department of Human Services Child Care Licensing Division.”

In terms of finding new spots for families being displaced by the Bailey closure, Strom says, “Our best effort to help families find licensed child care is to send them to the www.greatstartconnect.org  website through the State of Michigan Great Start Collaborative. This website search engine is geographically-based and encourages parents searching for care to enroll in the system and query their particular childcare needs. They can select family homes, centers or both and request preferences so the system can generate a list of providers that match their needs.”

ELi thanks Lori Strom for her help with this report.