TKW Consulting

Child-care workers give up cash for career
By ANDREA BUSHEE, Telegraph Staff
Published: Tuesday, Jul. 18, 2006

Choosing a career where the average wage is less than a gas station clerk didn’t scare away Stefni Galipeau. Galipeau fell in love during one of her classes at Nashua High School South, but it wasn’t with just one person. Galipeau found herself adoring a group of toddlers and preschoolers in her early childhood education class at school.

“I fell in love with that age,” she said. “I just love hearing their stories.”

Galipeau, who recently graduated from Nashua High South, at first thought she wanted to work with elementary-school aged children. Once she started working with preschool-aged children in class, she learned she was happier working with younger kids.

Yet her choice comes with a price tag.

Childcare workers in the state earn an average of $8.88 per hour or about $18,500 per year. Based on state wage data, that’s less than the average parking lot attendant and garbage collector. It’s roughly half of what the average mechanic, police patrolman and firefighter earns.

Galipeau knows she will bring home a small paycheck each week and she has accepted it. Galipeau, and other students in the program, said they were willing to give up higher pay to be happy and for the chance to make a difference in a young child’s life.

Emylee Disario took a pay cut to work at a daycare center after school. Disario traded her job at the Burlington Coat Factory for about $2 less an hour to work with children.

“Money doesn’t bother me. I’d rather do what I love,” said Disario, who was enrolled in the early education program at Nashua High.

Disario said she either wants to teach two-year-olds in a daycare center or work in a home for abused children.“I have a lot of compassion for those kids and I think that I could help,” she said.

Despite, the students’ enthusiasm, many child-care centers have a hard time finding, and keeping, good help because wages in the industry are so low.

Even as the child-care industry generates millions of dollars in revenue from parents, profits are slim, providers say. There’s little money left over to pay child-care workers what they deserve.

Some workers have attained college degrees, but it’s not a universal requirement. For instance, state regulations require workers in licensed child care facilities to have:
• An associate’s degree or higher with a minimum of 12 credits in the field of human services, or related field;
• The equivalent of 2 years of full-time experience working with children, either as a paid employee or volunteer;
• Any combination of college credits in human services and experience with children that total 2 years;
• Documentation of 7 years of parenting experience.

Providers operating home programs don’t need to meet any minimum requirements before they enter the field, according to the Bureau of Child Care Licensing. In addition, the state is “pretty skinny” on continuous training hours – six annually – expected of all child-care workers, although the requirement mirrors those in most states, said Linda Smith, executive director of the National Association of Child Care Resource and Referral Agencies.

The state, though, wants to encourage child-care providers to seek more staff training and national accreditation – steps that improve programs and the industry, said Mary Castelli, director of operations support at the state Department of Health and Human Services.

A new state-rating program called Licensed Plus recognizes providers who improve their practices and staff qualifications, and parents can see these steps when choosing providers, Castelli said.

And by making licensing records – which detail safety and staffing violations – more accessible on the state bureau’s Web site, providers have more incentive to keep their programs above par, she said.

While wages remain low, the state offers relief to those who pursue an education in early childhood education. There is such a need for child-care workers in New Hampshire, the state has partnered with New Hampshire Community Technical College and Granite State College to offer tuition assistance to students who qualify, said Susan Nichols, who oversees the scholarship program at NHCTC.

The scholarships cover anywhere from 50 to 100 percent of the tuition for early childhood education courses, she said. The student’s first childhood course is paid at 100 percent. The point of the program is to increase the number of credits that early childhood workers have, she said.

Picking a path
Students in the early childhood education program at Nashua High are taught philosophies in childhood education, as well as child development and behavior management.

The students work directly with children attending the Purple Panther Preschool, located at Nashua High South, and the nearby Adult Learning Center. The program also involves working with elementary school students, lesson planning, creating curriculum and learning how to manage a daycare center. The high school students read and sing with the children, supervise and organize activities.

There are usually about 100 high school students who enroll in the early childhood program, said Jean Godlewski, the preschool director. Most of the students go on to be educators in some form, she said.

Some students, like Carolyn Labrie, thought they wanted to work with young children when they started the program, but soon learned it was not for them.

“It can get crazy,” Labrie said about working with young children. “It’s too much.”“I kind of like the older kids. It seems like you can do more,” she said. Labrie, 17, plans to teach high school English someday.

One of the benefits to the program, said Godlewski, is students can decide which age group they like to work with, so they don’t have figure it out in college.Other students decide altogether the field is not for them.

Jacob Delude enrolled in the early childhood education program at Nashua High and later decided he didn’t want to work with young children as a career.

“It’s a great profession,” he said. “You’ll always have a job.” But he wants to be a firefighter, he said. He said he likes kids a lot, so taking the courses during high school made sense, he said.He was one of about four male students in the program. He liked how the classes were hands-on and the kids seemed to like the male students, he said.

Delude would recommend the program to any other student, male or female, he added.

“If you have any kind of profession that is going to deal with kids, you should take this class,” he said.

Jane Marquis, the director of the Adult Learning Center childcare program said most of the teachers she hires are women and many of them are mothers.

“It’s very hard to attract the male gender to this field,” she said.The state has deemed early childhood education a non-traditional field for male students and encourages high schools to boost the male enrollment in such programs.Helayne Talbott, an early childhood teacher at Nashua High South, said she has had only a few boys take her class over the years.

One way to recruit them, she joked, is to tell them “just think you can be in a class with 18 girls!”

Honest work
Talbott says she is honest with her students about what it is like to work with young children.

“They work like dogs,” she said about teachers in childcare centers. She is honest about the pay they will receive, she said, but she is also honest about the rewards they will
get from doing what they love.

“There’s a feeling you get from it that is very hard to replace,” she said.Despite the amount of work involved and the relatively low pay, many still seek out the field.The early childhood education program at Rivier College is thriving at the undergraduate level, school officials said. There were about 150 students enrolled in the program this past semester.

Charles Mitsakos, director of the education department, said teachers who work with young children are able to see the “incredible impact” they can have on children’s lives.

“It sets the stage for development,” he said.

Next year’s incoming class shows a 35 percent increase in the number of students enrolled in the early childhood education program, he said, which is integrated with general special education training and allows graduates to work in either field.

Casey Charron, 17, who took early childhood education classes at Nashua High, is considering a career in speech pathology or working with children who have special needs. She would like to continue working with children preschool age or younger, she said.

“They are fresh,” she said. “They don’t really know much, so you can teach them a lot . . . and they can also teach you things because they have a new perspective.”

// posted by Tammy Wachter @ 4:53 PM