One of the state’s leading day care providers told families Tuesday that three of its facilities will close their doors in two months.
The shuttering of the Loveworks locations in Montpelier, Milton and Williston comes at a time when waitlists of a year or longer are the norm across much of the state. Dozens of families now have nowhere to turn for an alternate source of child care.
“One parent called us and said ‘I’ve called every single child care in my area, and each one of them had an eight month to year-long waitlist. I might have to literally move out of state because of this’,” Aly Richards, CEO of the nonprofit child care advocacy group Let’s Grow Kids said.
The day care provider is set to close the three locations on March 13. Two remaining Vermont locations, in Essex and South Burlington, will remain open, but tuition will increase by 12%.
Combined, the three closures will affect 25 staff members and 85 children across the state.
Amanda Goodwin, spokeswoman for Little Sprouts, which acquired Loveworks and its sister companies Heartworks and STEAMworks in November 2018, said the closures became inevitable after their end-of-the-fiscal-year reports showed the stark reality that none of the company’s five Vermont locations were profitable.
“So we had to figure out how we were going to address that fact swiftly and with the greatest amount of compassion,” Goodwin said.
Goodwin said one of Loveworks’ biggest challenges was finding and retaining staff. She said they kept locations in Essex and South Burlington is because it’s easier to find employees in those areas, in addition the facilities had the highest enrollments.
Many states require that child care facilities give families 30 days of advance notice before they close, Goodwin said. She said the almost 60 days that Loveworks gave families, while not ideal, was “above and beyond” what regulations typically require.
For many parents, “above and beyond” was not how the notice felt.
“In terms of support given to parents, it was very limited,” said Hillary Wolfley, who has a 2-year-old at Loveworks in Montpelier. “We were invited to tour the facilities up in Essex and South Burlington, neither of which have openings — not that we could travel that far anyways.”
“Anybody who finds a spot in two months, it’s just pure luck,” said Rowan Cornell-Brown, Wolfley’s husband. “It just means somebody moved or something and a spot opened up.”
Wolfley and Cornell-Brown said the parents at the Montpelier location have banded together to try to imagine out-of-the-box solutions, like nanny shares, to find some way to bridge the months-long gap their families may face.
“’It’s a prime example of an industry where the market isn’t healthy and can’t sustain itself,” Cornell-Brown said. “There needs to be some sort of intervention from some level of government to help teachers, providers, and parents.”
Let’s Grow Kids, hoping to avoid losing 85 child care spots in Vermont is trying to find new leadership to take over the sites. They’d like to retain services for the families and staff impacted by the Loveworks closure.
“I want to be really clear about this,” Richards said. “Every child care facility is a Loveworks. The economics of child care do not work right now.”
Richards said unfortunately the closings were not surprising. She said it’s just a microcosm of what’s happening all over the country.
“We should not be devastated by a business closure,” Richards said. “The fact of the matter is, we have so little capacity for child care in Vermont that when something like this happens, we’re all scrambling.”
She said the primary underlying reason for these closures is a crisis in workforce development: not enough investment in recruiting and retaining teachers.
“What we need is money into the system,” Richards said. Right now, parents pay more money that they can afford, and providers are paid low wages with no benefits.
Goodwin said Loveworks would be thrilled to see state government take action to ensure child care centers like theirs and the parents they work with would never face these situations.
“You’re seeing Vermont heading to crisis with our aging population, our workforce crunch, credit downgrades,” Richards said. “Right now, child care is in crisis, and it’s a key reason for the trouble we’re in. But — it’s also our greatest opportunity to turn that crisis around.”