Allan Appel PhotoC
Hope Executive Director Georgia Goldburn, far right, with Mayor Harp, Beth Bye, and some of the kids.
With early child education slots a growing and pressing need statewide and in New Haven, you’d think a pioneering, successful early child care center serving poor and working families would have no trouble fill spots in a new, expanded Wooster Square location.
Think again.
That sobering situation emerged Tuesday afternoon at an otherwise festive ribbon-cutting. Mayor Toni Harp, city economic development officials, and early child care advocates including the new state Early Childhood Commissioner Beth Bye, showed up to mark the relocation and expansion of the Hope Child Development Center.
Kids in the infant room, where they had just had a tasty fruit snack.
Hope, which has grown from 7 to 23 employees since its founding in 2002, now serves more than 60 kids. It moved last October to the sunny cheery spaces, complete with outdoor playground, vacated by Ziegler Head Start at 81 Olive Street in Wooster Square.
Bye and other officials hailed Hope’s achievement, including its leader’s pioneering citywide CERCLE program, which recruits under-employed New Haveners with a passion for early childcare and mentors them into a new career.
Before the ribbon-cutting, Bye heard from about 20 day care providers, whom Goldburn and CERCLE‘s Tamesha Robinson had assembled from the Greater New Haven area.
Their immediate concern: The crisis in late reimbursement to centers like Hope, from “Care for Kids,” the state’s primary child support program, whose late payments are creating a crisis for low-incoem families and providers.
Goldburn reported that due to slowness or glitches in a mandated change-over in computer programs, state reimbursement payments for over 40 percent of Hope’s kids — those supported by “Care for Kids” (families at 50 percent or less of state median income) and those who are in the care of the Department of Children and Families — are severely late.
Two CERCLE success stories: Kharisma Redding and Jahnaya West-Flemming.
Hope Child Development Center is just beginning to receive, five months later, reimbursement for kids who began coming to the center in September, Goldburn said. “This has been an issue for years for DCF, but now we have a perfect storm forming” over the child care industry.
“We are underwriting two state agencies. It’s not sustainable. iI’s a scandal,” Goldburn added. When the payments don’t come in, she said, “we cannot ask poor parents or foster parents to subsidize.”
So despite the literally crying need — 51,000 infant and toddler slots are needed in the state, said Bye — Goldburn has still not filled five of the 13 new slots the relocation has created. She said she needs reassurance first that the state programs are going to be reimbursing in a timely fashion.
The commissioner, on the job for only 11 days, heard Tuesday from people like Michele Ellis, whose Creative Me center on Blake Street serves 27 kids.
Ellis’s chief concern — in addition to late payments — is turnover of her staff.
“There’s a high turnover in early childhood. The level of pay is not what it should be,” she said.
She was at the meeting not only to hear Commissioner Bye but to see if soon one of the graduates of CERCLE, with a certificate in the field, might come to work at her center. The unpaid training, mentoring, and then paid internship, which CERCLE provides, means that a provider like Ellis receives an employee who is ready to go.
Bye, who once ran a day care business herself, promised to follow up on the providers’ concerns.
She cuts ribbons, I'll cut red tape.