Many people say that staying home to care for one’s own children is still the ideal form of child care. But what is ideal is not necessarily realistic. With more parents in the work force than ever, the need for good early child care and education has become increasingly important.
In an effort to draw attention to this critical issue and to celebrate young children as this nation’s most precious commodities, the National Association for the Education of Young Children, one of the largest not-for-profit professional organizations in the country, has designated April 19-25 as the Week of the Young Child.
The annual nationwide celebration kicks off in Lake County at Gurnee Mills April 19 with three hours of free family entertainment beginning at 12:30 p.m. Performers will include children’s singers Ella Jenkins and Joel Frankel.
“Over the past seven years, we’ve had blockbuster events (at the mall) that just keep getting bigger and better,” said Charlene Ackerman, executive director of the Paul K. Kennedy Child Care Center at the Veterans Affairs Medical Center in North Chicago and president of the Child Care Coalition of Lake County, the not-for-profit volunteer organization sponsoring the celebration.
Another highlight of the week will be a lecture by child psychiatrist Stanley Turecki, a frequent guest on “The Oprah Winfrey Show.” He will discuss his latest book, “Normal Children Have Problems, Too,” at 7:30 p.m. April 23 at the College of Lake County’s Performing Arts Building in Grayslake. Admission is $5.
Turecki’s appearance is made possible by the Quality Project, a new program created by the coalition to improve the quality of early child care in Lake County. It is funded through a $200,000 state grant obtained earlier this year by state Sen. Terry Link (D-Vernon Hills).
The coalition itself comprises county agencies and professionals involved in health, education, welfare and business, all of them working in partnership to promote quality child care for children and their families through public advocacy and education.
By definition, according to the coalition, quality early child care emphasizes the needs of each child, provides the child with a clean and comfortable environment, is staffed by well-educated, well-trained adults.
But not all child-care centers and day-care homes are able to meet these criteria successfully, according to Barbara Haley, a registered nurse with the Lake County Health Department. Some of them are legally operated but unlicensed and may go unregulated as a result. Still others are staffed by child-care workers with only minimal education and no continuing early child-care training.
These disparities became apparent to Haley in 1989 while she was coordinating several programs through the health department that required routine interaction with a variety of child-care centers.
“I noticed big differences in the way these centers were run,” Haley observed. “While some places were just meeting minimum requirements and maybe even slipping below them, other places were the Cadillacs of care.”
In response, she enlisted the help of other early childhood professionals, and together they formed a task force (which evolved into the coalition) to address these disparities and search for solutions.
For the last nine years, the organization has been planning and implementing programs to educate families, businesses, public policymakers and the community concerning quality child care and how it can be achieved.
Last spring, for example, it launched a project called Advocating for Children Together in which it invited elected public officials and state legislators on a tour of three child-care facilities in the county.
The facilities included a state-of-the-art child-care program at Lake Forest Hospital, a residential day-care program in North Chicago and a community nursery school in Highland Park, which served a large, Spanish-speaking population.
“The contrast among the programs was very interesting,” said Pat Goodman, a former coalition president and independent early childhood consultant based in Highland Park. “Yet they were all high-quality, all licensed and all geared to the developmental needs and interests of the children.”
She said this last point is significant because research has shown that appropriate mental stimulation in the first three to five years of life is paramount in helping the developing brain reach full potential.
Link was so impressed by what he saw that he initiated and secured the $200,000 state grant, which he presented to the coalition in January.
“Making sure there is adequate care for children has always been my concern, so I was happy to do it for them,” Link said.
According to Goodman, the grant money is being used by the coalition to fund the Quality Project. One of its goals will be to raise the qualifications of child-care providers by offering increased opportunities for education and training. “You can’t have a quality program without having quality staff who are staying abreast of new developments in the child-care field,” she said.
Partnering with businesses to help fund educational scholarships for these workers might be one option, according to Carol Eglsaer, director of the Lake County Family YWCA’s Resource and Referral Center, a state-funded service that maintains a countywide database of licensed and available child-care providers.
But there is an even bigger problem in the dearth of child-care workers in general, according to Eglsaer. Many continue to eschew the profession because of its lack of compensation and benefits, and turnover is high.
For the last several years, the coalition has been hosting a business round-table for employers and encouraging them to consider child-care issues when developing employee benefits packages.
“Businesses would not be able to survive without a stable child-care environment because it allows them to maintain a stable work force,” Eglsaer said.
And now with more state money at hand, Goodman said, the coalition also may review the possibility of a group health insurance plan for child-care employees in the county.
Another goal of the project will be to increase the number of licensed and accredited child-care facilities in Lake County. There are about 167 licensed child-care centers and day-care homes servicing an estimated 14,500 children in the area. Under state law, some day-care centers can operate without a license if they fall within certain exemptions.
“We’re trying to encourage unlicensed caregivers to see the benefits in licensing,” Goodman said. “It’s more professional and makes them appear more credible.”
Organizers of the project also hope to provide parents with more information so they can better assess the quality of early child-care programs and make more informed choices.
“Without money, we did great things,” Ackerman said. “Just think of what we’re going to do with this grant.”
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To register for Turecki’s seminar, call 847-604-4405.
