This commentary is by several parents of children who attend AllTogetherNow preschool in East Montpelier, including Carrie Childs, Mike Dougherty, Paul Eley, Andrea Epstein, Hannah Geier, Sarah Kinsler, Stephen Laird, Steve Sheeler, Daniel Wheeler and others.
Late last week, the families of AllTogetherNow preschool in East Montpelier got the message that all parents and caregivers of young kids dread: Our children’s school would be abruptly shutting down.
The state Division of Fire Safety had accelerated a timeline to bring parts of the facility into compliance. The school, which has operated in its current space for nearly two decades, can’t afford the upgrades. Its permit is now set to be revoked next Monday. The enforcement action will leave 16 children without care, and six skilled early educators will lose their jobs.
These kids have nowhere to go. There are just a few child care centers in the Montpelier area, all with lengthy waitlists. According to data from Let’s Grow Kids, more than 400 additional preschool slots would be needed to meet the demand in Washington County.
Aside from more time in the current space, the best case scenario for AllTogetherNow families would be to airlift the program to another location. That could be complicated and expensive too, but it would provide some stability. The kids would stay together in the nurturing group environment they’re used to. The teachers would remain in the early education workforce. The Montpelier area would retain those few much-needed slots.
The alternative is that this school community would splinter into a cluster of piecemeal, in-home arrangements. The result of the state’s effort to more strictly enforce regulations on this school could be to push its students into even less regulated environments.
AllTogetherNow is a unique child care center. The kids spend most of their time outside, in an expansive play yard with activity stations that constantly change — the space itself feels alive. Students tend a garden and a flock of chickens, play music, and make more art than we can fit on our walls.
But the school is a model in other ways. It has for years operated at five stars, the highest level of the state’s STARS quality rating system, in part to be able to provide the maximum amount of financial assistance to families who need it. The school’s staff are caring, committed educators who graduate kids that are beyond ready for kindergarten. Those teachers kept the center operating even after the death of its founder, Ellen Leonard, last November. But they are caught in the middle of this difficult situation, and some are already planning to leave the field as a result.
The folks who send their kids to this school are primarily working parents. Among them are several public servants who worked directly on the response to this summer’s catastrophic flooding, plus others who work in education, construction, manufacturing, medicine and more. All of us now expect to cut back on work due to this disruption.
And of course, we’re not alone. Child care settings close all the time, especially when regulatory issues are in play. We all want our kids to spend their days in safe spaces. The issue is that when a child care center closes, there is no capacity for the system to absorb these inevitable crises.
The Montpelier area, like all of Vermont, needs a right-sized child care system in order to have a functioning local economy and to be a livable place for families. The families and staff of AllTogetherNow preschool are working to keep our school intact to help make that notion a reality.
