Deep dive: What’s causing the lack of affordable, quality early childhood education here and elsewhere?

By Tom Ayres

Senior Staff Writer

The current dilemma facing the Woodstock Nursery School (WNS), which will suspend operations this fall after 74 years as the local area’s longest- standing preschool, is emblematic of the ongoing crises in affordability and accessibility facing childcare providers and families locally, statewide and nationally.

The accredited, Woodstock-based childcare center announced last week that it will suspend operations for the coming school year due to its board’s inability over the course of the past two-and-a-half months to recruit a new, state-licensed lead teacher credentialed by the Child Development Division (CDD) of the Vermont Department of Children and Families (VDCF), In a conversation with WNS Board of Directors member Nicola Auriema last week and in follow-up discussions with area childcare providers and prominent advocates for children and families earlier this week, the Standard plumbed the depths of the problems associated with hiring and retaining highly qualified, committed and licensed early childhood educators both regionally and throughout Vermont.

“Unfortunately, we only found out in June that our lead teacher was going to be leaving, which didn’t really leave us very much time to recruit a new, licensed teacher. And we need to have a licensed teacher in order to be licensed by the state and get the childcare subsidy,” WNS representative Auriema said. “We basically only had a monthand- a-half to recruit because we felt like we needed to know by the beginning of August [if we had a new, licensed lead teacher] in order to be able to start in September,” the WNS leader explained. “We’ve been trying to recruit on specialized websites such as School-Spring to find teachers, but we just haven’t found someone yet. So we’ve put our licensing on pause with the hope that we could maybe find someone that would be able to start in January, and if not, start for the next school year in September of 2026.”

Auriema elaborated on the challenges inherent in recruiting qualified early childhood professionals to staff childcare facilities and the ancillary impact that those employment issues have on the ability of a school such as the WNS to continue operating. “It’s really tough,” Auriema lamented. “We really didn’t have a huge list of confirmed enrollments to begin with when we found out about losing our lead teacher. It’s a difficult position to be in, with losing our teacher and then not necessarily having full enrollment, even if we found a teacher, because it wouldn’t give us a lot of turnaround time. It’s hard to recruit families while we don’t have a teacher — and then starting without full enrollment is, you know, just not financially feasible.”

Perusal of the Bright Future Child Care Information System database of the VDCF/CDD reveals the stark numbers that continue to vex licensed childcare providers and families with children under age five in Vermont. In addition to the soon-to-be-suspended program at WNS, which has a licensed capacity to accept up to 20 youths in its pre-school program for ages three to five, childcare slots in infant, toddler and pre-school programs in the area are chockfull, while waiting lists remain at daunting levels for working parents in search of childcare, either at full tuition rates or with substantive and perhaps even 100% subsidies offered by the state to assist lower income families. Enrollment opportunities this fall at the Rainbow Playschool, Little Branches Learning Center, and The Mill School in Woodstock, as well as at the publicly operated and taxpayer-funded pre-K programs at the Woodstock Elementary School and Barnard Academy, are non-existent. Other programs at full capacity in the vicinity include Hartland Cooperative Nursery School and 4 Corners Children’s Center in Hartland and the Bridgewater Community Childcare facility.

Ben Brickner, a member of the board of the Rainbow Playschool in Woodstock, a licensed childcare facility serving children ages infant to five, spotlighted the interrelated waitlist and recruitment dilemmas in an email to the Standard on Monday morning.

“As you know, the demand for quality early childhood education in our region continues to far exceed available capacity — Rainbow’s waitlist remains multiples of our state licensed capacity — and we regret that Rainbow cannot accommodate all families seeking care when they first apply, but we are committed to doing so as quickly as possible,” Brickner wrote. “To that end, Rainbow is actively hiring additional staff to increase capacity and better accommodate families on our See EARLY CHILDHOOD EDUCATION - Page 5D

An artist’s rendering of an indoor playground that will be installed at The Mill School childcare facility in Woodstock’s East End as part of an expansion program this fall.

Courtesy of The Mill School

Top, Aly Richards is the chief executive officer of Let’s Grow Kids, the leading childcare advocacy organization in the state. Above, licensed childcare centers in the local area and throughout Vermont continue to face staff recruitment difficulties that have contributed significantly to affordability and accessibility challenges for both provider facilities and families in need.

Courtesy of The Mill School

Courtesy of Let’s Grow Kids

From Page 1D waitlist,” he added. “Quality early childhood education requires the right people, not just more people — Rainbow seeks individuals who not only meet the state’s regulatory requirements, but who also share Rainbow’s commitment to exceptional care.”

Other childcare providers in the area also weighed in on waitlist and staff recruitment issues in phone conversations with the Standard on Monday. The Little Branches Learning Center, formerly the Woodstock Christian Childcare program, located at the First Congregational Church on Elm Street in Woodstock Village, presently has licensed spaces for 55 children, including 35 full-day spots and a 20-space after-school program, which is expanding to 40 slots at the Woodstock Elementary School (WES) this fall. The Little Branches Program serves children from ages infant to pre-K, with specific age group allocations: seven spaces for infants, eight for transitional toddlers, 10 for 18-month to three-year-olds, and 10 for pre-K ages 3-5. The center maintains a waitlist by age group, currently at about 40, according to Little Branches director Ruth Brisson. The primary Little Branches programs will remain at the Elm Street church while the after-school program moves to WES in September.

Brisson said that Little Branches is presently focusing a lot of the organization’s energy on fundraising to enable an eventual move to its own, expanded, independent space. The fundraising initiative is taking place under the fiduciary auspices of the Woodstock Community Trust. “I don’t know what will play out with that, but currently we are here for now,” Brisson said during a phone interview last week. Any ongoing staff recruitment challenges will, of course, be exacerbated by a possible move to a new, larger location, but for now, Brisson said Little Branches has enacted some structural changes that have helped allay the waitlist concerns to a limited degree. “I think that the way we’ve changed the age groups has helped us move new families in so that our wait list isn’t running quite as long, Brisson offered. “Having that transitional toddler class has helped greatly. Just changing how we do our age groups and in what space we put them has absolutely helped,” she said.

Across town in Woodstock’s East End, The Mill School opened in 2023. It is presently licensed to serve eight children in its infant program and 10 in the toddler age category. The school offers a scheduled day program for three- to five-year-olds but is not presently a licensed pre-K facility. The Mill School is working towards that licensure, including meeting a range of operating objectives established by the state and identifying a person to serve on staff at least 10 hours per week who has a Vermont early childhood educator’s license, school founder and business manager Caroline Olsen told the Standard Monday morning. Olsen said the school has a number of efforts in the works imminently and has also structured compensation for licensed employees that helps address the recruitment challenge somewhat, albeit at a tuition cost that exceeds that of other childcare centers in the immediate vicinity. “We are currently in 1,000 square feet and we’re about to open an additional 2,000, so we’ll be at 3,000 square feet within two weeks. We are tripling our size.” Olsen reported. “The new space will be for our twoyear- olds during the day and will also be for our aftercare program after school. We’re planning on getting transportation. We’ve got a van that we’re getting financing for and we’ll be able to transport kids.” Olsen also said she expects the licensing process for a proposed, full pre-K component at the East End school to take the better part of a year to 18 months. Addressing the facility’s high tuition costs — which are subsidized by the state for up to 100% depending on a family’s income level and financial need — Olsen said the higher pay that The Mill School is able to offer staff has been a plus for recruitment.

“Our whole premise in starting The Mill School was to create higher pay for staff. I still think we have a lot of work to do, but our whole mission was starting at a higher rate for everybody.” Olsen noted. “A lot of other centers start below $20. The least amount of money that anyone on our staff makes is $20 an hour, and we go all the way up to closer to $30 an hour — so we’re between $20 and $30. Our goal is to add benefits as well, but for now, we offer paid vacation and paid holidays and paid time off when we can.

“Vermont is doing a really great job with their subsidies for families,” Olsen opined. “So we started our tuition rates a lot higher than most of the local centers — we’re closer to $2,000 a month for tuition — and that’s going directly to our staff. We’re charging more so we can pay our staff more — the majority of our expenses goes towards payroll and then the state is offering really great benefits: they actually just increased the income levels for families that qualify for subsidy. So because the state is offering such great benefits for subsidy, it’s like a full circle — we can pay staff more and families who need greater access to help pay for tuition get it.”

While there is still a significant amount of work to be done at the regional and state levels to address the continued inadequacies of Vermont’s childcare system, slow but steady progress is afoot, thanks in particular to the enactment by state lawmakers last year of S.76, according to childcare activists such as Aly Richards, the chief executive officer of Let’s Grow Kids, the principal statewide advocacy organization in Vermont. The relatively new law has taken aim at increasing access and affordability by expanding the state’s Childcare Financial Assistance Program (CCFAP) eligibility criteria, increasing reimbursement rates to programs, prioritizing infant and toddler care, and expanding career pathways for potential early childhood educators.

Richards pointed out this week that since S.76 went into effect on July 1, 2024, more than 1,000 new childcare spaces have been created statewide and the law has reduced tuition costs for more than 4,700 families, while also helping to foster higher compensation for early childhood educators in Vermont. In addition, workforce de- See EARLY CHILDHOOD EDUCATION - Page 6D

From Page 5D velopment components of the 2024 law have helped create a scenario in which more than 500 students are now enrolled in associate’s degree programs in early childhood education at the Community College of Vermont. Organizations such as Let’s Grow Kids and funding mechanisms such as the two-year-old First Children’s Finance Vermont, a program that was formerly part of Let’s Grow Kids and is now administered by the state, are also offering tuition reimbursement and student loan repayment programs to early childhood education students in the state.

All this progress aside, however, Richards contends that there is still much work to be done, especially related to enticing more young people into the early childhood educator fold with improved compensation, the addition of good benefits packages, and improved working conditions in licensed childcare facilities.

“One of the ways to ensure we’re really cracking the nut on early childhood is recognizing early childhood educators as the professionals that they are,” Richards noted. “And that’s what we’re doing in Vermont. We are the first place in the country that is really creating a system that actually supports education and workforce development so that our kids get the best possible start by really assuring that you’re attracting, retaining, and recruiting folks into this really important field. Our goal is to really create an early childhood education profession in Vermont, and it’s really well along the way.

“This past session, the [Vermont] Senate actually took the very historic step of passing the Early Childhood Education Profession Act and we’re expecting the House to take it up when they reconvene in January 2026 for the next legislative session,” Richards continued. “It’s a really important step that is being led by members of the field to bring to life more professional recognition by the state and to create a more sustainable, accessible and transparent system centered around safety, quality and equity,” the Let’s Grow Kids leader added.

“That would really make it easier for programs to recruit and retain early childhood educators — and it would really strengthen our childcare system so that it can fully meet the needs of the kids and families it serves,” Richards concluded.