6.4 - Military Dreams

Surprisingly, there is a successful model childcare system operating right here in our country, and it might not be where you expect: the military. At this very moment, the Department of Defense has over 200,000 children in their care.¹⁸ Two hundred thousand children. It’s such a good system that many tout it as the example of large scale success—among those is the National Women’s Law Center Co-President Nancy Duff Campbell, who in 2005 said, “The military’s systemic approach to childcare continues to serve as a model for our nation’s civilian childcare needs.”¹⁹

Many of the problems outlined in this chapter have been successfully dealt with in the military childcare system. For example, care is available on a sliding scale to parents to make it affordable. Parents have easy access to the military childcare system and don’t end up lost on long waiting lists. The military offers high-quality care, fair compensation and training for providers, and holds its centers to national uniform standards. Of the nearly holy trinity of childcare needs—affordability, quality, and accessibility—the military hits the mark with all three.

One person taking advantage of the military childcare system is Wendy. Wendy married her high school sweetheart after they first met at a county fair in Idaho; she was only sixteen when they first met. She and her girlfriends were walking into the fair, and he was leaving for the night. As they passed each other on the grass path lined with noisy fair games—toss the ring around the bowling pins, shoot the ducks, dart the balloons—and with the happy screams of roller coaster riders in the background, they recognized each other from their high school hallways.

She remembers the sticky sweet smell of cotton candy that night. It was summer. Wendy was sixteen when their eyes met and the, “Oh hi,” passed her lips to her future spouse.

Then they started talking, and got along so well that he borrowed a magic marker and wrote his phone number directly on her arm. She called him the next day before the marker could wash off, and they talked for hours. They talked through high school, taking a break to dance at her senior prom, and right into marriage when she was eighteen.

Just after she got married, Wendy had a baby, and her husband joined the military. Now twenty-four, Wendy and her husband have two children, Naomi is five and Xavier is just over one year. The childcare services provided by the military have been essential. When asked where her family would be without it, Wendy answers, “Poor. We would have struggled a lot more than we are now. We’re better off mostly because of the subsidized childcare offered by the military.”

Wendy’s financial assessment is accurate. The cost difference of subsidized military childcare really makes a difference. Consider that in the Army a family that makes below $28,000 annually pays no more than $43 per week for childcare, or around $2,000 annually.²⁰ And then compare that to the national average cost of childcare, which can rise to $10,000 per year or more.²¹ Childcare subsidies make a real difference, particularly as the number of children and families who live in poverty grows. According to the U.S. Census, 35.9 million Americans lived in poverty in 2003, up from 31.6 million just three years before.²²

Wendy’s children aren’t the only members of her family who benefit from the higher standard of military childcare. Wendy also works at the facility, where her pay is significantly higher than if she worked at a nonmilitary daycare. Full-time pay at civilian childcare facilities averages out to $8.47 per hour, compared to military entry-level wages of between $9.34 and $13.23 per hour.²³ The military pay can go up to $18 per hour for classroom leads with Child Development Associate degrees.²⁴ In fact, the Department of Defense has taken the added step of creating policies to ensure caregivers are paid similar wages to those who work for the Department of Defense in other jobs that require similar amounts of “training, experience, and seniority.”²⁵

In the end, it’s actually the very affordability of military childcare that allows Wendy to work at all. Without the subsidized childcare, Wendy would run the risk of making less money than the family pays out for childcare—a catch-22 that afflicts many modern families. “I wouldn’t be going to work without the subsidy here,” Wendy recognizes, “and we definitely would be having more financial problems if I wasn’t going to work.”

While some may picture military childcare as harsh classrooms full of kids in uniform with strict, noncreative curriculum, that’s far from the truth. Many parents find their children are warmly welcomed and that their children respond in turn. Alberta, mother of two, has a daughter in a military childcare facility. Daliyah is four years old and full of life. She’s learning fast, including learning to speak Spanish right along with English, and runs into her classroom each morning to greet her teachers with a warm, snug hug. Each night Daliyah includes her teachers in her bedtime prayers of good wishes.

The attention to provider training and curriculum detail shows when you enter a military childcare center. The Clarkmore Development Center at Ft. Lewis in Washington, for example, has a ratio of ten children to one teacher, and serves infants through school-age children. Each classroom has several age-appropriate learning stations. These learning stations range from art areas, sensory tables, play stages, music and “gross motor” or big movement rooms, to book listening stations, reading and writing centers, and all sorts of other learning activities that the teachers and students fit into their regular daily curriculum. The sound of happy kids playing floats in from the outside play area, yet chaos is kept to a creative minimum. The space is designed for child safety with windows into all closets, open restrooms, and open-view corridors through the classrooms.

Art, ideas, and colorful sponge paintings decorate the classroom walls, pictures of kids and teachers hang outside the classroom doors, and the smell of hot food fills the air at lunchtime. One such wall lists preschoolers’ ideas for the definition of “dissect”: “Sounds like an insect to me.” “Dissect is a glove.” “You have to cut before you eat.” “It sounds like a broken fish.” These young children were working on water curriculum and learning about fish (including how sometimes people dissect fish). They also worked with a water table and water animals— a favorite being the pretend turtles—and listened to curriculumrelated stories. There was clearly enthusiastic, controlled learning going on in those classrooms.

These creative sparks don’t happen by accident. The military has a rigorous childcare provider-training program designed to raise staff quality and pay, as well as uniform certification standards with an enforcement component based on regular inspections. ²⁶ The military also has a uniform accreditation system, which has built in ways to assist providers in giving better care and education.²⁷ The Army, for example, requires extensive initial training for eighteen months, with an ongoing annual training requirement of twenty-four hours per year.²⁸ A childcare provider’s employment is dependent on training, and all go through national and local background clearance checks.

Although the federal government is a long way from implementing an adequate nationally subsidized childcare program despite a host of proven benefits, there are local programs scattered across the country. A Wisconsin study that looked at the impacts of extending their kindergarten through twelfth grade education system to include free preschool for four-year-olds found that such programs save money in the long run. The study found early education reduces later crime rates and welfare needs, while increasing the total educational cost-benefit by 68 percent—partly through lowering the need for special education (saving $42 million) and students needing to repeat grades less often.²⁹

Helen Blank, a nationally recognized leader in childcare policy from the National Women’s Law Center, shares her dream vision for the future of childcare in America. “My ideal solution would be to have universal childcare—first it would start with paid family leave so parents have the choice of staying home those first few months, and then ideally at least some of the childcare would be available on a sliding scale, and some would be universally available for no cost.” Blank envisions a future where some parts of childcare are universally funded just like the public K–12 school system.

Blank’s ideal fix for now? “I’d give childcare programs money through the federal childcare Development Block Grant so we could have a combination of neighborhood childcare centers that are networked around a core resource referral program that could offer training, support, materials, and more—the military has a similar structure.” Support like that envisioned by Blank is needed more now than ever. Federal funding for childcare has been frozen for four years, laments Blank, while at the same time the number of people in poverty—the very people who most need help with childcare costs—has grown. In fact, in the face of budget trouble, many states have been cutting their childcare assistance programs. The lack of public funding for childcare further impacts the accessibility, quality, and affordability of good care. In addition, new welfare-to-work requirements that went into place in the 1990s increased the number of parents in the workplace while the childcare supply remained relatively stagnant.³⁰ Sad to say, childcare in low-income communities is the least available.³¹