Piecing together a life as a single mom in a rural community is hard enough on its own, but our conversation with one parent in the Upper Valley with one teenager, and two children under 5 illuminated the complexity of support systems, rural environments, and the realities of childcare programs for families in Vermont.
As soon as our interviewee was removed from her domestic violence situation, state agency employees were already helping her to search for and waitlist her children in childcare programs, but even with this support she faced a mountain of complicated and interwoven challenges. Transportation added one barrier to the mix – living in rural Corinth without a vehicle at the time, this mother was not able to look at childcare programs further afield that might have sooner openings or more accessible tuition. Adding to that, though she qualified for 100% of what the Vermont state dictates as a subsidy for childcare, local programs have tuitions that cost more than what that 100% subsidy amounts to.
With a child who requires special education intervention services approaching the three-year mark, the situation got more tense and complex. Rather than receiving special education intervention services at home, her child would be required to receive them in a supervisory union school-based program. The realities of trying to enroll her children in the same school, to keep receiving uninterrupted education and support, proved to be a nightmare for this mother.
The supervisory union was trying to help her find a program with the necessary services for her child, but the only nearby school-based pre-k program that worked and qualified was the local k-8 school three minutes down the road from her house. While this seems like a perfect fit, there was a complication. Despite having filled out applications for her three and four year olds’ enrollment within 24 hours of applications being released, the school utilized a lottery system to identify students for enrollment. While her youngest was accepted, her four-year-old was not. It was devastating for this mother.
“Any hope of me getting off Reach Up, getting a job, building my family forward was erased,” she said. It was going to be impossible for her to navigate having children in different schools, in different locations. This is something we’ve heard across the board with parents who have multiple children enrolled in ECE programs. It can feel like a roll of the dice to see if both children can get into the same program or if a parent must make a hard decision around how they can commute to separate locations.
For this mother, the next several months were spent advocating her case to numerous other programs, looking to find a program that could offer the services her youngest needed, that could take her four-year-old, and that was financially viable for her.
“I went to every facility and got on every waitlist, I went through HeadStart, early HeadStart, supervisory union, school board, DOE, advocating. If my two children can’t get into the same universal pre-k… I am one human. I have no support system, I cannot get my kids to multiple schools….My life falls apart and my son is neglected.”
By a stroke of luck, she found an elementary school in Chelsea that would take both her children. Granted, Chelsea is a half hour drive from where she currently lives, but at the moment it’s the best option available to her (she now has access to a vehicle – something she did not have in the immediate aftermath of her domestic violence situation mentioned at the beginning of this piece). Even so, this was a special exception that she was able to secure through her advocacy work, and the complications didn’t stop there.
“They said, under VT state law we don’t take [her youngest’s] IEP (individualized education plan), you still have to seek special education services somewhere else.”
She felt that it made no sense. How could anyone be telling her that she was opting out of his IEP by taking the only solution to him being enrolled in education and care this year, at all?
Luckily, they were able to find a solution. They transferred his IEP status to a “consultation” and kept a running spreadsheet with notes and check-ins, that fulfills the required documentation. Additionally, his pre-k teacher happens to be a special educator. Though things worked out in this one instance, this mom is all too cognizant of how easily and more likely it would have been to not come together.
“We are so lucky compared to some families that would not have gotten this far,” she says. And while she is appreciative of the attempt to provide support to families by the state, she also is all too aware of how much work and advocacy she had to do herself to get this far.
As our conversation continued and we learned more about her family’s experience, more and more complexities of the system emerged. There is support for families and ECE providers alike, but each individual case is so different that there’s no systemic way to address the complexities. For example, the lottery for enrollment – while certainly designed to remove potential biases or unfair advantages to child enrollment, the way that it worked out for this family was unworkable, and it was unable to be adjusted to account for the realities that come with the landscape of today’s families.
Particularly, the rural landscape adds to these complications. Our interviewee is not someone who grew up in Vermont, but rather moved from the south. She commented time and again how the isolation of rural Vermont took both a mental toll as well as a logistical toll on this entire process. Transportation, for example, has emerged as a huge challenge. Rural Vermont doesn’t have the same public transportation infrastructure that could help families access many more ECE programs in different geographic areas. Again, this has emerged as a pressure point for other parents in similar situations – how far are they willing, or able, to commute to a childcare center – and how does it have a ripple effect on their lives, jobs, health, etc.?
While she is hopeful of what continued advocacy can bring in terms of legislative support for families and the ECE sector, our interviewee also asked us to help bring awareness to the nuance of proposed solutions. She mentioned universal Pre-K as one that has a few questions worth examining more – if universal pre-k care is offered to all four-year-olds, where does that focus come at the expense of? She’s worried about what happens to care for three-year-olds, as three years old is when special education requirements kick in. However, if programs are focused on making sure they can provide enough care and staff time to four-year-olds, they may restrict the enrollment of three-year-olds in their programs, leading to more complicated situations for parents like her. She’s grateful to the arc of support curving toward more programs for families with children who need care and education, but she asks us to make sure to consult community members about potential challenges that legislators or advocacy groups might miss, depending on who they talk to.
All in all, it’s a complex problem with many ad-hoc temporary fixes and stopgaps, but it’s a situation that desperately needs support, attention, and care.