Dartmouth petition seeks to keep for-profit chains out of child care

This story by Christina Dolan was first published by the Valley News on Sept. 3.

HANOVER — More than 300 members of the Dartmouth community signed a petition submitted to President Sian Leah Beilock last week, urging her administration to keep the college’s child care center out of the hands of for-profit chains.

The appeal comes in response to the work of a campus committee tasked with expanding access to child care options for faculty, staff and graduate students. As word spread that proposals from for-profit providers were on the table, concerns arose among some faculty and staff that those options might drive up tuition, compromise care and degrade working conditions for the center’s staff.

“We understand there is a shortage in child care, but corporatizing DCCCC is not the solution,” stated the petition, which was submitted Aug. 26 to Beilock and other upper-level administrators.

The administration responded two days later by assuring the petitioners that increasing access to child care is an ongoing process in which nothing has yet been finalized.

The college is “considering multiple options to expand the quantity and quality of day care in the area ,” Senior Vice President for Capital Planning and Campus Operations Josh Keniston wrote in an email to the community last Wednesday. “It is important for you to know that no final decisions have been made. We plan to share the options to increase access and affordability under consideration early this fall and gather feedback and input from our Dartmouth community members before any final decisions are made,” he wrote.

The Dartmouth College Child Care Center serves 87 children from infancy through age five. It is open to the children of any full-time, benefits-eligible employee of the college and offers a sliding tuition scale based on family income, ranging from $650 to $2,400 per month. The center operates weekdays from 7:30 a.m. to 5 p.m.

More than 120 families are currently on a waiting list for the center, according to director of media relations and strategic communications Jana Barnello.

In her inaugural address to the college last September, Beilock said that providing access to quality child care would be a priority of her administration. Over the coming year, she said, “we will be partnering with Dartmouth Health and organizations across the Upper Valley to expand child care options.”

One company, Boston-based Bright Horizons Family Solutions, has come in for particular scrutiny by faculty and staff after a copy of a business proposal was reportedly circulated outside administrative circles.

Bright Horizons operates more than a thousand early education and child care centers in the U.S., the U.K., the Netherlands, Australia and India. The company reported a net income of $74 million in 2023, an increase of 9% from the previous year, according to a report provided for investors on the company’s website.

The idea of introducing the profit motive to campus child care doesn’t sit well with some faculty and staff.

“They tend to target high-income neighborhoods, and then charge high parent tuition but have lower than median teacher pay,” and the minimum legally required student-to-staff ratios, Casey Stockstill, an assistant professor of sociology, said by phone last week.

Stockstill’s research focuses on segregation and inequality in preschools.

The Dartmouth College Child Care Center currently provides each classroom with a level of staffing that exceeds the state minimum requirements.

For infants, who require the most adults per child, the New Hampshire minimum ratio is four children to one adult, with a maximum group size of 12 children per room. Dartmouth’s center has two infant rooms with eight children and three teachers in each room, for a ratio of less than three children per adult.

For ages 5 and up, the state minimum ratio is 15 students to one teacher, with a maximum group size of 30 children per room. At Dartmouth, the 5-year-old classroom has 19 students with three teachers, for a ratio of a little more than six children to one teacher.

Keeping staff-to-student ratios at the legal minimum increases workloads at profit-driven companies, leading to high rates of turnover, Stockstill said. Bright Horizons uses what she called a “plug and play curriculum,” to compensate for that turnover by making it easier for new staff to come aboard throughout the year.

For-profit chain child care centers have a turnover rate of 47%, compared to a 26% rate at nonprofit child care centers that are sponsored by an institution, according to a June 2024 study published by the National Women’s Law Center and the Open Markets Institute.

“Curriculum matters,” Marcela DiBlasi, an assistant professor of Latin American, Latino, and Caribbean Studies, said by phone last week.

Two of DiBlasi’s three children attend the college’s child care center. She likes that the DCCC curriculum is adaptable to what the kids care about and the way they learn. The teachers at the Dartmouth center are dedicated and experienced, she said.

“They help us see our children in wonderful new ways,” she said. “To think that these educators would be told what they could teach, and that that would be a benefit, is laughable.”

DiBlasi said that for-profit child care companies have an interest in reducing competition by working to prevent the creation of government-funded programs such as universal pre-K.

“These companies are actively lobbying against parents,” she said.

Bright Horizons’ most recent annual report includes a caution to investors about potential risk factors posed by publicly-funded child care.

“Governmental or universal child care benefit programs could reduce the demand for our services,” and “place downward pressure on the tuition and fees we charge, which could adversely affect our revenues,” the report states.

With a shortage of affordable child care options, Stockstill said that there is a trend toward employers trying to solve the problem in-house to help attract and retain employees.

Locally, Bright Horizons has been operating the child care center at Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center since 2015. The DHMC center serves 110 children. All of its child care workers are employed by Bright Horizons.

Bright Horizons did not respond to requests for comment by deadline.

The staff-to-child ratios at the DHMC center are “set by the state of N.H.,” Carolyn Isabelle, Dartmouth Health’s system vice president for talent acquisition and career development, said in a statement Tuesday.

Dartmouth Health has also been working with the Carter Community Building Association (CCBA), a nonprofit recreation organization in downtown Lebanon, to open a 40-seat child care center, exclusively for employees of the health system. The CCBA closed its preschool program in June after 25 years of providing preschool during the academic year for children, ages 2 through 5.

Currently under renovation, the new center, which will be managed by Bright Horizons, is scheduled to open in early 2025 and is expected to serve children from 18 months to 6 years old.

Read the story on VTDigger here: Dartmouth petition seeks to keep for-profit chains out of child care .