Colleagues, in the interest of making our faculty meeting time tonight more productive, I?d like to make the Child Care Committee report via e-mail now.

 

In March 2007, this ad hoc committee was formed to address faculty and staff interest in the College providing options for child care to members of the Hendrix community. The committee members are Vicki Lynn, Duff Campbell, Chuck Chappell, James Jennings, Judy Jones, Karl Lenser, Shawn Mathis, Susan Perry, JJ Whitney, Marcy Bujarksi (director of the St. James Learning Center in Little Rock), and me. There are benefits associated with the College providing child care, including its use as an employee benefit in attracting and retaining faculty and an opportunity to train students interested in early childhood development or business. Please see this article prepared for the National Association of College and University Business Officers for a fuller discussion of issues of College-provided child care (http://www.nacubo.org/x9355.xml?ss=pf ).

 

Over the last year, we have explored three options:

 

1) We first asked existing local child care centers if they would partner with the College to provide child care for Hendrix community members. Under this arrangement, an existing child care center would save a certain number of slots for us. We had no takers.

 

2) Representatives of Bright Horizons (http://www.brighthorizons.com/Site/Pages/index.aspx ), a company that runs employer-based child care centers, came to campus to give us information about starting our own child care center. They assessed properties owned by the College as potential center sites and gave us estimates for building, equipping, staffing, and maintaining a child care center that would meet our standards. The estimate of what it would cost to start the child care center and the cost to the College to subsidize child care as an employee benefit were shocking (to me, at least). I?m not going to tell you the dollar amounts now.

 

3) We are currently exploring a third option. Vicki is in the process of asking owners of existing child care centers if they would be interested in starting a new child care center (perhaps a branch of their original center) that would be built on land donated by the College. The child care center would then devote a number of slots to Hendrix community members, and we would presumably have other arrangements with them that would be beneficial to us. We?re waiting to hear back.

 

Once we have indications of interest from child care center owners regarding option 3, our committee will prepare a report of these three options and submit it to the Committee on Academic and Professional Concerns. Please contact me if you have any questions.

 

Leslie

LTempleton

Department of Psychology

Hendrix College

templeton@hendrix.edu

 

 

