Long waits make day care options scarce for Bloomington parents

Editor’s Note: Since the January closing of Pride and Joy day care in Bloomington, the Indiana Daily Student has investigated child-care options available to IU students, faculty and staff. See Wednesday’s IDS for the second in this two-part series.

It took more than a year for professor Marissa Moorman to find an opening for her daughter at Campus View Child Care.

By then, her daughter had settled in at Pride and Joy, a day care Moorman heard about through word of mouth on campus.

When Campus View contacted Moorman about the opening, she turned it down because she was happy with Pride and Joy.  

Unfortunately for Moorman, Pride and Joy day care was recently shut down after the unexpected death of a four-month-old child in January, leaving many parents, Moorman included, searching for places to take their children.

Moorman signed her child up for after-school care at her kindergarten, but other parents, many of whom are IU professors, are still trying to find child care. She said the search is not easy, and IU isn’t doing enough to help.

“I don’t think the day-care options in this town are good,” Moorman said. “I think the University should offer far more than they do.”

Currently, IU offers five day care options for students, faculty and staff. Tim Dunnuck, coordinator of child care services at IU, oversees these IU-sponsored programs.

Three of the centers are licensed and nationally accredited – Campus Children’s Center, Campus View Child Care and Hoosier Courts Nursery School. The other two, Knee High and Sunflower, are unlicensed cooperatives where the children’s parents serve as the day-care providers. Though the co-ops are exempt from licensing, Dunnuck said they are required to meet home day-care standards.

The three nationally accredited IU centers offer 165 spots for children ranging from birth to 5 years old. The two co-ops add an additional 18-20 spots. But the waitlist to obtain one of these spots is more than 100-names long.

Dunnuck said one problem IU faces is not knowing how many children of students, faculty and staff are on campus. That number can be roughly gauged by the length of the waitlists, though the exact number is not known because each center calculates independently.

“I can pretty much know we’re never going to meet the need,” Dunnuck said.

Currently, the programs are filled by April or May for the fall, he said. Over time, the waitlists have decreased because of competition from the Bloomington community.

“Many times people don’t even call us,” Dunnuck said. “They assume we’re full – which we are.”

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Senior Lynette Anigbo takes her 15-month-old son to Campus View Child Care, but her name was on the wait list for 13 months before her son was accepted.

In those 13 months, Anigbo transferred to three different day cares, two of which she said were “horrible.” Although she enjoyed sending her son to St. Charles Daycare Ministry in Bloomington, it was too expensive.

When Anigbo was offered a spot at Campus View she thought she would have to turn it down because of the price. It costs $233 per week to send an infant to one of the IU centers. That figure adds up to almost $12,000 a year – more than what an in-state student pays to attend IU for one year. The fees decrease for toddlers and preschoolers but still hover around $200 a week.

Under normal circumstances, Anigbo would not have been able to send her son Charles to Campus View, but with a Child Care Development Fund Voucher, which assists with financing child care for low-income families, she only pays about $100 a month. However, even the voucher program had a seven-month wait list.

Dunnuck said IU offers some fee assistance, such as the vouchers, for students but none for IU’s support staff or faculty.

IU day cares receive 39 cents from each student activity fee to aid parents.
Dunnuck also said the day cares receive an IU subsidy that reduces fees. Part of Dunnuck’s job is to get these subsidies increased. He said President Michael McRobbie has been particularly supportive, increasing the subsidies from the Provost’s Fund by $322,730 in 2006. But assistance only goes so far, Dunnuck said.

He admits there is a certain portion of the IU population that will never be able to afford the fees at the IU centers.

“It’s a huge financial commitment to send your kid to a nationally accredited facility,” Dunnuck said.

Graduate student Mariella Arredondo is among those who cannot afford IU fees for her 2-year-old daughter.

“IU’s day care is so unreasonable,” she said. “I don’t know who they’re catering to; it’s definitely not grad students.”

Arredondo has recently enrolled at Penny Lane Day Care, which she says is more affordable.

“When people tell me our child care is too expensive, I know that it’s partly true,” Dunnuck said. “But people also have to realize how expensive it is to run these centers.”

Dunnuck said he constantly receives calls from IU parents who cannot afford the centers.

“It doesn’t make sense to come to school and then not be able to put your kid in an IU day care,” Anigbo said.