Child Care Center owners are feeling the pinch–and pinching back!
Last month, the marquee outside Kare Bear Learning Center on the McKinley Highway advertised special “depression rates”. ”It’s $100 a week for everybody until I fill up my center,” Nancy Caenepeel, the administrator of the nonprofit child-care center said. This is the first time in the business’s 28 years, Caenepeel said, that she ’s done a across-the-board slashing of rates, which normally range from $130 to $150 per week to attract new business.
Caenepeel is not alone.
Melanie Brizzi, child care administrator for Indiana’s Bureau of Child Care, said enrollment is down at many child-care centers and ministries across the state, as well as at certified and licensed home day care programs. As such, she said, providers are coming up with unique ways to draw more parents in, as well as to help retain existing families who are having difficulty paying their bill. ”Every one’s feeling the pinch,” she said.
For child care and day care providers in Elkhart County IN, there is a glimmer of hope.
Just this month, business has seen an ever-so-slight uptick, thanks to the number of unemployed people taking advantage of opportunities to go back to school for training in new career fields. Those families, along with other low-income households, are eligible for child-care vouchers to help cover the cost of care.
There is opportunity in every market downturn
It might seen counter productive to open a new child-care center in an area that’s been hit particularly hard by the recession, but that’s exactly what Jennifer Fisher is doing. Her Mishawaka-based home day care center had become so popular that she went looking for a location to open a center. Though she wasn’t specifically seeking a building in Elkhart County IN, a former child-care center on Grant caught her eye. Foundations Child Care Center opened just a couple of weeks ago. ”In the past hour, I’ve enrolled five families,” she said one day this week. The business is unique, she said, because care is offered 22 hours per day and the evening/night rates are the same as the daytime rates. ”Flexible child care should be the industry nor, not the exception,” Fisher said. Ms. Fisher is part of a new breed of child care center owners who look for the opportunities in a difficult market–and take them!
