Lights, Camera … Childcare! Previewed

Voices lifted in exuberant song outside a movie theater overlooking Middletown Avenue?

Just a few years ago, a scene like that might have been unthinkable at the scruffy but beloved Cine 4 theater that closed last year after 51 years in operation.

The occasion was a sneak peek of Friends Center Flint Street — named for the pitted drive that leads up to the familiar flat-top white building where a local childcare nonprofit plans to build a new early education campus.

The Fair Haven Heights-based, Quaker-influenced nonprofit purchased the 1.93-acre property in August 2022 from Soffer Associates.

Last month, the City Plan Commission voted unanimously in support of the sliding-scale child care center’s proposal to transform the former movie theater into a space that will accommodate 80 infants and toddlers supported by 28 educators, as well as its administrative and academic offices, a centralized library, and a teachers training center.

At the opening reception outside the theater, Friends Center board member Kaaren Janssen, among those handing out nametags, highlighted the accessibility of the site. (The Friends Center currently operates out of locations on East Grand Avenue and Blake Street.) 

“It’s close to the highway [Interstate 91], right off Route 80, and we’re trying to go into different areas in the city of New Haven,” she said, as guests helped themselves to a spread of clementines, sour cream butter pound cake, and mini cinnamon rolls amid the celebratory air.

Admissions director Marianne Godfrey was enjoying a glass of lemonade a few paces away.

“There’s such a high demand for infant toddler care,” she said, a young child shouting with glee in the play area. ​“So many families, one of them can’t go to work if they don’t have child care.” 

Site director Aundrea Tabbs-Smith began the presentation by introducing a Friends Center song to the audience of roughly 100 assembled under a white tent.

“This is what we sing at every staff meeting, it’s what we sing when someone has a birthday, when someone has been with us a year, or five years, when someone has purchased a home, has graduated with a degree, or is going to speak at a conference,” she said, a faint rumble from the highway rolling in.

After leading the group in spirited song, she discussed the gifts and challenges of involvement in Friends Center. 

“Being a part of a community that advocates for their teachers and honors children is unheard of, and it’s unheard of because it’s hard, because it takes a level of unwavering commitment and dedication from everyone to ensure our world’s youngest humans are receiving the very, very best,” she said.

Board member Latrice Allen Frasier said she had just left the soccer game of her daughter Zoe, an alum of Friends Center who’s in the second grade.

“She’s a leader in the classroom, a leader on the field,” she said. ​“I looked at her grades and I said ​‘oh my goodness,’ so academically, socially, Zoe is just a well-rounded person.”

Friends Center, she said, ​“means so much to me in how my daughter sees the world, how she sees herself in the world, how she knows to give and give back.”

Board member Greg Melville of New Haven Friends Meeting recalled the beginnings of Friend Center, with a group of Quakers back in 2000 seeing a tremendous unmet need in their community for high quality daycare that was leaving children, particularly low-income ones, behind. 

“These Friends had a vision of a Quaker-inspired early childhood education,” he said, ​“and we work every day to be faithful to their early vision, combining care for the social and emotional well-being of young children from three months to five years, with development and education of their intellectual faculties.” 

That vision extends beyond children.

“We work hard to provide food and housing, as well as educational and financial resources to teachers and staff to help ensure that our providers are equitably served, as they care and educate our children,” he said.

As an example, he said ​“69 first-year Yale School of Architecture students are right now hard at work building the first of four, two-teacher residences near the East Grand Avenue facility, with the first occupancy slated for the fall.”

After asking the guests to acknowledge the educators in the audience, Executive Director Allyx Schiavone expanded on the crucial need for rent-free housing, before letting loose on a broken system.

“The Connecticut Early Childhood Education workforce, which is 92 percent female, is paid on average $30,404 per year for full-time work,” she said. ​“Women in Connecticut who care for our youngest children are being paid to live in poverty.” 

Governor Lamont’s recent announcement of $70 million in state bonus payments for child care workers does little to remediate the problem, she said.

“Our society continues to ignore the science,” she said. ​“There is a direct link between positive life outcomes and high-quality early care and education.”

She cited recent statistics to demonstrate the steep economic cost of that ignorance.

“ReadyNation [National Child Care campaign] just determined that Connecticut loses $1.5 billion per year in revenue because we don’t have an adequate infant-toddler early care and education system,” she said. ​“We lose $1.5 billion because we refuse to invest in the youngest versions of ourselves.”

But then there is Mississippi. 

As detailed in a recent New York Times article, that state, she said, ​“in 2013 made the calculated decision to offer high-quality full-day programs, with qualified teachers paid at the same rate as elementary school staff members,” she said, eliciting a cascade of cheers and applause.

The result: ​“in 2011, 75 percent of students graduate, four percentage points below the national average. By 2020, the state had surpassed the national average of 87 percent by one point.”

“What Mississippi teaches us is we shouldn’t be giving up on children,” she said.

Janssen, the board member, highlighted the larger role Friends Center has taken in its commitment to spreading the word on the need for high quality child care.

“Our reach is broad, from rallies on the New Haven Green, to Hartford and to Washington, DC,” she said, referring to Schiavone’s charged words at a press conference on the growing child care crisis as part of her appearance as U.S. Rep. Rosa DeLauro’s guest at the State of the Union address.

With that, Jaanssen invited everyone inside.

Amid the aroma of popcorn, guests, young and old, added to a mural, scrawled their thoughts on disrupting societal patterns, and studied site plans. There was the familiar majestic lighting and the sign above the booth indicated that Cine 1 was showing a movie.

Otherwise, there were signs of transformation. The movie was about the Friends Center. Cine 2 was for maintenance and storage. Cine 3 and Cine 4, ticketed for classrooms, were dark and bare, evoking memories of the throwback lumpy seats.

Nowhere, perhaps, was the sense of nostalgia more dustily redolent than in the upstairs projection room.

A Yale film archivist ​“came and got a bunch of the equipment, so they have it in their museum now,” said Ken Beeman, facilities manager and IT associate who’s also Schiavone’s partner. 

“Stu has been unbelievably helpful,” he said, referring to second-generation Cine 4 co-owner Stu Soffer. ​“We’re asking him questions all the time about the breaker boxes, how do we get this to work. He’s just tickled at what this is becoming.”