Theo Wells-Spackman is a Report for America corps member who reports for VTDigger.
Mount Snow Child Care in West Dover plans to scale down slots and staffing in its child care program for community members starting in November, resort leadership announced earlier this month.
Alternative providers available on short notice are scarce in Dover and the surrounding Deerfield Valley, according to Amber Good, an affected parent.
Good works as a physical therapist and has been supporting her family on one income after her husband was diagnosed with cancer in the spring. If her family cannot find a viable child care option, Good said she would have to step away from work to care for her children.
Given her role as the region’s only full-time physical therapist who does at-home care, Good said the resort’s decision has left her concerned for her patients’ continued health access as well as her family’s finances.
In an Oct. 2 letter, Mount Snow Child Care Manager Katelyn Roske and Skier Services Director Brian Donovan wrote that the resort is shifting to an “employee-first” model, phasing out enrollment of non-employee families by Nov. 15 and creating a waitlist for children of local community members. Temporary child care slots for visitors to the resort are expected to remain.
The cuts will affect 16 non-employee families, according to Samara Sausville, a spokesperson for Vail Resorts, which since 2019 has owned and operated Mount Snow. Some parents believe the number of impacted families is higher. The resort declined to provide the number of staff positions it will eliminate.
With looming layoffs at the child care center, Good questioned whether Mount Snow’s move to decrease child care offerings is truly an “employee-first” approach to operations as the Oct. 2 letter suggested — or instead about cutting costs.
“I understand you’re a business, and it was a financial decision, but you’re in our community,” Good said. “Your business thrives when our community thrives.”
Sausville said high costs, state-specific child care regulations, and challenges posed by Vermont’s “rural nature” have made the program unsustainable. Parents and advocates emphasized the difficulty the shift is causing to an area where child care offerings are relatively thin, as the community considers its relationship with one of the region’s largest employers.
The child care program has always operated at a loss, Sausville said, and — at least for the portion of the program that serves the children of employees year-round — will continue to do so. The decrease in offerings was necessary to “ensure the long-term sustainability of our operations,” she said in an email.
Erin Roche, director of the Vermont office of First Children’s Finance, said that while this change does not spell catastrophe for the region’s child care landscape in the long term, these cuts leave a “big gap.”
“It probably means that somebody in (each affected) household isn’t going to be able to keep a full schedule at work, or they’re going to have to reach out to friends and family,” she said. “This is an economic development issue, as much as it’s anything.”
Mount Snow Child Care has been a “cornerstone for families” in the Dover area for more than two decades, according to a petition circulated last week by affected parents. The aim of the petition — which has garnered 218 signatures as of Thursday afternoon — is to reverse Mount Snow’s decision and call on the resort to negotiate alternatives based on feedback from community stakeholders.
The petition called the cuts “an act of corporate carelessness.”
Sausville said in an email Tuesday that the cuts were “a local decision made by the team at Mount Snow” and is unconnected with the company’s global two-year push to save $100 million in operating costs by the end of fiscal year 2026.
Richard Allin, an impacted parent in Wilmington, wrote an open letter posted on social media, urging Mount Snow and Vail Resorts to work with families and local governing bodies to devise sustainable solutions such as “limited community slots, exploring partnerships, or creating a cost-sharing model that works for everyone.”
“This decision separates children who have grown up together, leaves dedicated teachers without jobs, and forces many parents to make impossible choices about their own employment or even staying in the area,” Allin wrote.
‘Logistical and financial hurdles’
The cuts at Mount Snow come at a time of ongoing concerns with rural child care access. Though Roche cited significant improvements in Vermont’s child care coverage since the passage of Act 76 in 2023, she said the growth is still “not fast enough.”
Winston Prouty Center in Brattleboro is among the child care providers that received an uptick of enrollment requests since Mount Snow’s announcement despite having a waitlist, according to Kim Simeon, the organization’s Early Learning Center adminstrative director.
Andrea Sumner, the program director at East Dover’s Kids in the Country, said she had limited availability for toddlers, and more in her 3-and-up classroom. Though recent child care reforms have eased the financial position of her business, a lack of staff has kept her program from expanding to full capacity, she said.
“At this point, I don’t think it’s available child care slots. I think it’s finding available workforce,” she said.
In this period after the partial loss of a program, Roche said there may be opportunities for those who were laid off to join other providers to expand their capacity or to start their own business to fill the newly created need. First Children’s Finance offers some grants to assist in those efforts.
Vail Resorts acquired Mount Snow as part of a $264 million deal in 2019, which saw the complex’s former operator Peak Resorts subsumed into its new owner. The move added 17 ski areas to the Vail portfolio. It now runs 42 in total — and at least one is expanding rather than downsizing its child care offerings. At Vail’s Heavenly Mountain Resort in California, leadership announced in August that the resort would begin offering year-round child care to the local community.
Sausville said that Vermont-specific factors heavily influenced the decision. State staff-to-child ratio regulations, as well as rules limiting price increases to families, contributed to an environment that the company deemed unsustainable.
The state’s rural layout presents “logistical and financial hurdles,” according to Sausville, that are less prevalent in relatively urban states like California, “where facilities may benefit from economies of scale and broader infrastructure support.”
At the moment, according to Sausville, a higher number of child care slots at Mount Snow translates to greater financial losses.
Roche also pointed to recent expansions and investments in child care programs from a number of other Vermont ski areas, including Stratton Mountain Resort and Vail’s own resort at Stowe, as well as the state’s massive investment in child care through tuition subsidies and other supports in Act 76.
“Part of me wonders if (Mount Snow was) taking full advantage of the sort of business and financial opportunities that the child care law (Act 76) would offer them,” Roche said.
Rep. Laura Sibilia, I-Dover, said her children attended the Mount Snow program and emphasized that the impact would reach beyond Dover to surrounding towns. The area’s child care offerings had been in “decent shape” in the past, she said, in large part because of Mount Snow, in addition to local pre-K programming.
“It feels most productive at this point to also be trying to think about ways to bring additional child care here to the valley,” Sibilia said.
