New Haven provider helps fill gap for CT ‘high-quality’ child care

Sandra Dill crouches next to a child-sized table, surveying the artwork that four of her young students are painting.

The children, ranging in age from toddlers to about 6 years old, are swirling colors together, delighted to learn that blue and green mix to make teal.

“What are you painting?” Dill asks, smiling at them.

“A rainbow!,” says one girl. The boy sitting next to her shouts that, he too, is painting a rainbow.

“A beautiful landscape,” the oldest in the room adds.

“An egg roll,” the fourth seems to say. Dill furrows her brow for a moment, unsure whether that’s what the child said, before breaking out into another warm smile.

“That’s great,” she tells the students. “Two rainbows, a landscape and an egg roll.”

The exercise of learning to mix colors, share paint and work as a group is part of Dill’s curriculum for her at-home early childhood education program. She’s a part of a group of people nationwide who are aiming to fill the dearth of high-quality early childhood education programs by offering care from their homes.

Dill, of New Haven, is among those who got help setting up and licensing a business from Connecticut-based nonprofit All Our Kin. Connecticut has about 2,000 licensed family child care centers , defined as an at-home program that is licensed to provide care for up to six children.

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Connecticut has seen a declining number of early childhood education providers since 2010, from about 4,500 providers to about 3,200 in 2023, according to a report from Connecticut Voices for Children.

Early child care — and its cost — has become a topic of increasing national interest. Child care has gotten less affordable for many families, all while a growing body of research suggests that a high-quality education for young children has big impacts on their brain development.

Dill, whose program is called the Sandra K. Dill Family Child Care, said that’s what people don’t understand about the work she does. It’s different from a traditional day care because it has a set educational plan for each day, she said. It’s designed to help kids get ready for school, so when they start kindergarten, they have a leg up. But it’s not quite the same as a typical preschool program.

“We cook for the children, we clean, we keep up with the paperwork, keep up with the business, the financial part of our business, the relationships with the parents,” Dill said.

“On top of that with professional development, you want to want to learn, so you can better educate the children. You’ve got to educate yourself. I love learning about kids and how they develop. But where do you find the time?”

Government investment

Advocates have called for additional investments in early child care at the federal and state levels, saying that it would improve outcomes for kids in the long run.

From birth to 5 years old, children’s brains are developing rapidly . Research has shown that children who get a high-quality early childhood education know more words and are more prepared to begin school.

Research also suggests that children who engage in high-quality early childhood education are less likely to drop out, less likely to be justice-involved and tend to be healthier as adults.

Gov. Ned Lamont convened a Blue Ribbon Panel in 2023 that produced a five-year plan to improve Connecticut’s early childhood education system. The plan called for more than $2 billion to implement the costs.

In the most recent legislative session, lawmakers passed a bill that added just over $20 million for child care, an allocation from the remaining American Rescue Plan Act money. The money is a far cry from the Blue Ribbon Panel’s recommendation.

The legislature also set up a fund that employers can donate to that would offset the cost of child care for workers. It’s not clear whether the fund will attract the private funding the system needs.

The law also created an advisory commission for the Early Childhood Care and Education Fund, established a cost-sharing pilot program for child care in eastern Connecticut and set aside some of the Office of Early Childhood budget for teacher bonuses.

High-quality care

Dill developed her curriculum through some of her training with All Our Kin. She’s taken classes for a Child Development Associates Training Certificate and is taking classes towards an associate’s degree. She’s also an advocacy leader with All Our Kin and recently went to Washington, D.C. to speak with federal politicians about early childhood education.

“I believe that when they play, they learn and how I can support them is when I do my observations,” Dill said. “Because we have to do observation. So that taught me how to just observe all the children. And I believe that children all develop differently at different levels and different paces.”

Observations are the process by which Dill notes each child’s developmental progress.

The rooms set up for child care are brightly decorated. They’re full of books — some in Spanish — and toys. She has activities planned for the kids including songs she teaches them.

Earlier this month, the children set out cushions to jump on while they sang “Five Little Monkeys Jumping on the Bed.” It helps them learn counting and sequencing.

They also spend time outside, where Dill has outdoor toys set up in her backyard. They have time for free play to interact with one another. She has games to help them practice fine motor skills.

The children also play games like putting paint into a zip-close bag so they can have sensory play and puzzles to learn shapes and colors.

She also has them learn about their emotions, including by using four dolls, which sit on a couch in her home, each with varied facial expressions and T-shirts labeled “happy,” “scared,” “angry,” and “sad.” It helps the kids understand, identify and express their emotions.

During painting time, one boy begins to cry because a younger child has rubbed paint across his picture, ruining the landscape he was trying to paint.

“Are you feeling sad?” Dill asks. He nods, and she promises that later, he can have a canvas all to himself.

“You don’t have to be sad, you know why? I’m going to let you paint that landscape,” she tells him.

Dill says it’s part of her goal to help the kids develop socially and emotionally. She’s helping them learn how to play on their own and with others, she said.

Dill started the at-home child care center when her daughter had twins. Child care was expensive and scarce, and she wanted to help her daughter stay in the workforce.

At one point or another, she’s had all of her grandchildren participate in the program, Dill said. In July, she had two of her grandsons in care.

She started in 2010 and remodeled parts of her home to provide the care. All Our Kin helped her get the home ready for inspection and licensing, and she applied for a lead paint remediation program out of Hartford to get the house ready.

Initially, Dill was licensed for six children full-time and three before or after school. Since she got set up with Head Start, a program that provides free learning opportunities for young children, the number has dropped by one.

She can have eight children with HeadStart because the program has different ratio requirements, she said.

The business courses that Dill took through All Our Kin are free for home-based educators. In addition to business courses, educators can learn about child development and other education topics.

In Connecticut, roughly 650 providers have been through All Our Kin’s business training, although the program operates in multiple states.

The Connecticut Health and Educational Facilities Authority recently awarded All Our Kin a grant to allow them to expand support for at-home early educators.

At-home care can offer more individualized attention for kids, experts say. It can also provide more flexibility for parents who work nights and weekends.

Dill is working now to expand her program to include night-time care for children whose parents work third shifts. She has a sleeping area upstairs and has gotten licensed to offer the care. She’s just waiting on families to start coming in, she said.

“What I want to do is eventually just do overnight care so I can be free to do some of the things that I really like to do, and one of them is just to mentor providers,” Dill said. “ … just walk them through some things, give them some tips that had I know when I first started, I would have been further along.”

Staff writer Erica E. Phillips contributed to this article.