Who's watching my kid?
Child care is in the news, and I'm most pleased to see University of Georgia President Michael Adams recognize that this is a need for faculty and staff. Being a father now, it would make things considerably easier to have on-site child care provided.
As of now, Emma Kate will attend Trinity Lutheran (starting part-time next week ... little sad actually), which is convenient to our house but not our work, which is where we'll be when she's there. The cost crunch, however, is very real, which is why I'm sympathetic to Teresa Perry's concerns ... but only so much. The McPhaul Center is a steal at $180 a month. We'll pay between $300 and $500 a month.
Granted I'm not a full-time student, but I wonder just how low UGA would be able to go and still be able to offer quality care, and make no mistake, The McPhaul Center is the best in the business.
Related to these issues, OneAthens are rolling out some excellent plans to help low-income families. And right off the bat, let me say kudos to the Nancy Travis House for the development of this scholarship program. These programs are just the kind of innovative thinking this community needs to address poverty.
As of now, Emma Kate will attend Trinity Lutheran (starting part-time next week ... little sad actually), which is convenient to our house but not our work, which is where we'll be when she's there. The cost crunch, however, is very real, which is why I'm sympathetic to Teresa Perry's concerns ... but only so much. The McPhaul Center is a steal at $180 a month. We'll pay between $300 and $500 a month.
Granted I'm not a full-time student, but I wonder just how low UGA would be able to go and still be able to offer quality care, and make no mistake, The McPhaul Center is the best in the business.
Related to these issues, OneAthens are rolling out some excellent plans to help low-income families. And right off the bat, let me say kudos to the Nancy Travis House for the development of this scholarship program. These programs are just the kind of innovative thinking this community needs to address poverty.
posted by Jmac at 7:12 AM
28 Comments:
I'm not totally unsympathetic to the "needs" of those calling for someone to babysit their kids while they work or study, but there is fairly large question that is being overlooked:
To what degree should taxpayers subsidize the competition for the already-existing private daycare centers in Athens?
If we fund daycare centers at UGa (I say "daycare," probably there'd be a "need" for "nightcare,as well), we are quite literally taking tax dollars out of the pockets of the folks who run the non-government subdidized daycare centers and using those dollars to create competition for the private operators.
I realize we do this in a lot of areas, but that doesn't automatically mean we should do it in this instance.
Although I guess we probably will. Anytime anybody yells for more of my money, they typically find a way to get it.
The issue you're going to have to wrestle with is this ... if this wasn't a public entity and some folks called for on-site day care, which isn't out of the norm at major corporations, then this wouldn't be an issue.
Also, I think you're setting up a scenario which hasn't happened yet and probably won't in that I don't expect we'll see a tax increase to cover what will ultimately be a relatively minor expense with regard to UGA. There are a variety of ways to offset these costs ranging from increased fees at UGA, trimming spending in other areas and having the parents directly pay for the care.
IHN of Athens is slated to receive part of the the Navy School to provide child care, and it's our aim to rely on fundraising and direct payment for services to cover our costs.
It's $180 a _week_. Not $180 a month. That's a pretty big difference.
Is it too much to ask people who can't afford or have time for babies to stop having them?
Apparently.
JMAC-
Being a father of a 2 year old myself, I know and understand the issues and frustrations with daycare here in Athens - my wife and I play "baby toss" as the article put it - most days and juggling schedules lead to many interesting situations.
However, I take issue with the assurance of the story and many of your comments, that this is a unique situation to UGA and not Athens as a whole. I would challenge you to provide me with the names of the major employeers in ACC who have on-site daycare - UGA (minimal), Athens-Clarke County (none), Clarke County Schools (none), ARMC and St.Mary's (I don't know).
Nobody is offering me or my wife assistance in daycare and I certinaly expecting a state subsidy to run it - yes, UGA's is subsidized because there is no way that $180 a month for 60 kids is paying the bills even close to reality.
Hillary:
Thanks for the clarification on the cost. yes $180 a week is a totally different story. Given that is about what I pay, I doubt UGA's is subsidized. I take back my second part of my post.
Josh, one can ask, but unless we either go the way of a fascist state or a Platonic one, in a free state people have the right to engage in as much sexual, procreative activity as they want.
Do you want it some other way?
I am not a University employee, so this is not me complaining on my own behalf. With that out of the way, isn't part of the equation that, for the vast majority of its employees, pay is rather low? The tradeoff at a University job is that you don't make much money, but you get good benefits (and generally have friendly hours). So isn't this a matter of saying that part of the good benefits that you get as a tradeoff for low pay should include childcare?
That doesn't pay the bill to do it, and I don't understand the economic details, but isn't that tradeoff why a University employee's situation is a little different from others in this town? (and before anyone jumps on me, I KNOW pay is low across the board in Athens).
Also, along these lines, I would be curious as to whether University employees would trade other benefits for this one.
Darren
Polus,
I swear sometimes you sound exactly like yoda. You just need to reorder some words.
But you're also right. Our society has certain things it wants like domestic peace, cheap labor, cheap agriculture, etc. In return we need to pony up services sensitive to needs of the people we expect to clean our classrooms, pick our oranges and serve us our McDinner.
Some of you watching Ken Burns’s new film on PBS these past few days might have noticed something I did. In mobile, municipal and faith organization supported childcare was created in the interest of economic development. When rural farmers were asked to leave their farms to come build bombs in mobile, they were given childcare.
A few decades ago, Athens asks farmers to come out of their fields and come work in our factories and university. We built housing (Hello Broad Acres) and a support system of social services.
The poor did not drive the factories from Athens. The poor are not out their trying to prevent new jobs from coming to Athens. We expect the poor to work whatever jobs benefit our quality of life and then we lambaste them for wanting a safe and cost feasible place for their kids to go while they're manicuring lawns in front of luxury student living.
A huge percentage of children in DFCS care are there because their parent did not supervise them. Affordable childcare is a major need and frankly part of the deal we made with the poor all those years ago. To anom who's got his and wants to damn everyone else: lets go through your past and find all the places you got a leg up courtesy of Uncle Sam. Then get out your check book and pay it back.
Yes, we are free to procreate as we please. But isn't forcing others to subsidize those choices an infringement on their freedom? At what point do we lose the freedom to choose NOT to foot the bill?
Philosophically speaking, of course. I've said for years UGA should offer more options for childcare. This debate comes up full-force every few years. This is definately not the first rally at the Tate center in support of more child care on campus. However, I don't remember the president ever making an appearance . . . so maybe this will go somewhere.
For the record, ARMC staunchly and stubbornly does NOT offer childcare. This is ridiculous considering the # of nurses on staff (my wife included) who's lives are a real juggling act when it comes balancing a rotating schedule with kids.
David
And josh,
No it's not too much to ask. But it is a long standing cultural issue and a bunch of white people in ironic t-shirts and horn rimmed glasses and not going to convince anyone of anything by sitting around the globe and talking about it.
Early childcare and after school programs and the best places we can talk to kids about responsible choices and how their choices affect their future.
Programs like Gentleman on the Move, Boys and Girls club and such should be overwhelming supported rather than dismissed to somewhere beneath the greenway and skate park.
If we continue to ignore the issue of childcare, it will get far worse.
And for those of you who think it is too expensive, you would shit your bed if you knew how much DFCS care costs.
dh,
I agree. But we have to stem the problem at its source and not make the kids suffer for their parents choices.
And it's nothing we're not doing already in other ways. 100% of my wife's job is subsidizing other people’s bad choices. Can I get a tax right off for that?
JMac--you make my point for me...
"The issue you're going to have to wrestle with is this ... if this wasn't a public entity and some folks called for on-site day care, which isn't out of the norm at major corporations, then this wouldn't be an issue."
UGa IS a public entity, and thus wants my money. McCorporation is private and spends it own money for daycare or healthcare or back rubs or whatever, and I have no reason or right to complain. So in that sense, it not only is an issue, it's THE issue.
David, as Jeff points out, it is a benefit to the community at large to provide all of its youth some measure of care, and the tradeoff, when properly followed through, is worth the initial investment. Conservatives love that old saying about feeding, fishing, and teaching, but they seem to ignore the hidden lesson that makes the truth behind it work: it actually does cost something to teach a person how to fish, so there's no escaping altogether having to pay something up front to find harmony in the afterwards. Certainly, the point to take from all that is that recurring costs are more damning and wasteful than initial wisdom. My thought is that people such as Jeff take it that childcare is not a recurring cost but an act of initial wisdom. And, so properly conceived and executed, we will see in the long term the total cost of poverty decrease.
As an evangelical, I wish that people did not have abortions, but I'm not committed to an unrealistic expectation of self-discipline that I cannot see how sexual education that includes preventative and responsible measures eventually leads to far fewer abortions than an outright ban. That's what my life has lead me to conclude, and the curious thing is that my more conservative evangelical brothers and sisters see quite clearly that the declining birthrates in Western countries is strongly correlated to people having access to education both in books and in birth control, and this decrease not on account of more frequent abortions. Fewer initial pregnancies means fewer occasions for people to need an abortion. Obviously, this is not an argument for my Catholic brothers and sisters. But, overall, it's clear that education, conscientious and progressive (not necessarily politically, but in terms of looking forward to the long term), means that people will "stop having them," those babies not even those who cherish the thought of babies want around to soak up state resources.
So, one loses the freedom to choose not to foot the bill when one's shortsightedness means permitting the cycle (giving fish, catching fish, giving fish, &tc) to continue uninterrupted. A conservative should take the fisher's parable quite seriously, rather than pay it lip service. For, if she did take it seriously, then she would know that we do have to make a truly hard choice now if we want our grandchildren to live a far more liberated life than our own. That's the spirit among some paleoconservative writers that I admire: a real and thriving commitment to transcendence means actually contemplating sacrifice in the context of one's descendents, not in the context of one's retirement.
I think that spirit is exorcised; I hope that spirit still haunts us.
(Also, Jeff, thanks for the praise. I think? I mean, Yoda was a little crazy about the Vienna sausages the first time we see him...)
"McCorporation is private and spends it own money for daycare or healthcare or back rubs or whatever, and I have no reason or right to complain. So in that sense, it not only is an issue, it's THE issue."
Um, except that the price you pay for McCorporation's products/services will go up. Isn't this exactly the argument conservatives make all the time to resist any regulation (family leave, environmental, minimum wage, etc.)? But now there's some huge distinction between paying more to private companies for their services and paying more in taxes?
Come on. You're paying one way or the other. And that's what you're really pissed about -- I've got mine, and stay away from it.
Darren
Amen Darren.
As an aside, who would have thought that a discussion of child care - including non-profit child care - would elicit such discussion and, in some cases opposition.
I try not to question people's intentions, but I'm really scratching my head on a few things here.
Well, Anon II, I'm not saying to stay away from what's mine, but I'm saying you better have a damned good reason for coming after it. And "It's not always convenient for me to work at my government job AND raise my kids at the same time" doesn't cut it with me.
And it doesn't follow automatically that prices on goods and services go up as a company provides benefits to its employees. There are many, many other factors that enter into prices--you might have heard in passing about things like "supply and demand" and "market forces" (quaint 19th century concepts).
Damn straight there's a tremendous distinction between public and private.
Or, I suppose I should say, there ought to be.
And "It's not always convenient for me to work at my government job AND raise my kids at the same time" doesn't cut it with me.
You're damn right about that son.
Tell that to the working mother who earns $8 an hour for a 40-hour work week and has to find somewhere to put her child so she can earn a living to provide for his/her needs.
Convenient? Unbelievable.
Market forces. Cute.
And somewhat right. Our local society responded to market forces in uprooting mostly self sustaining farm families and bringing them here with the promise of jobs and opportunities.
They came, we flourished.
Now, thanks to market forces, we've failed to keep the tide of economic development in our favor. Instead we’ve let our local economy become one of bars, junk shops and even more UGA dependency. Our current crisis is not the poor’s failure. It’s ours.
So let me introducing to another old concept: Paying your debts.
We made promises that we need to keep. We moved the poor here from the surrounding counties and put them up in public housing so that we could attract industry which in turn has paid for our often toted quality of life.
Market forces may have caused us to lose the industry but that does not allow us to evade our debts. You can try but I promise you, we'll all have to pay them.
With interest.
Strong with the force, Polus you are.
That's not Anon II; my name is at the bottom of this commeant and my previous comments.
"There are many, many other factors that enter into prices--you might have heard in passing about things like "supply and demand" and "market forces" (quaint 19th century concepts)."
Ah, yes, the standard conservative condescension toward perceived liberal ignorance of economics, practicality, or just plain math. When all else fails, pat the liberal on the head like a child.
Of course many factors affect price. I apologize that I did not preface my comment with "all other price-affecting factors remaining the same . . . " In the same way, however, my oh-so-ecomically-knowledgeable friend, I did not see you acknowledge that public budgets can change, that money for one program or benefit can be taken away from one and given to another. My sincere apologies for using the same shorthand that you did.
And before you say it, yes, government is a hungry monster, one that rarely contracts on its own. In the same way, however, private business given a break from this or that "onerous" regulation rarely pass the costs on to consumers (ask some physicians how much their med mal premiums have gone down since the Georgia General Assembly passed "tort reform").
Darren
Eh, I've posted on this issue before. Personally, I don't agree that we should subsidize childbearing in general. If you require a great deal of services to have a child, then you really should think about the implications of that decision and pethaps make a different one.
Furthermore, I feel cynically about the UGA case in particular because I don't see a movement which seeks to elevate, specifically, people who can't afford childcare because they are poorly compensated. What I see is a movement to more or less replicate McPhaul's quality for middle-class people who require higher-quality childcare. Because we have plenty of childcare available in Athens -- from the perspective of UGA employees what we don't have is enough high-quality childcare at subsidized prices that is also located conveniently to UGA employees.
That said, I'm a lot more impressed with those who pitch this issue as a competitive matter. UGA competes against the best of the best, and the vast majority of them have three times the childcare. If UGA wants to compete, it needs similar amenities.
I'm confused. First we were "quite literally taking tax dollars out of the pockets" of non-subsidized daycares, creating competition for them, which suggests that either those n-s daycares have to either raise prices to sustain the same level of profitability or go out of business. Now, it's not altogether the case that prices increase as a result of increasing payouts in the form of benefits. "Supply and demand" might indicate that prices, I dunno, stay the same or even decrease, you're suggesting.
Either these are two different anonymous commentors with two different arguments or these are two different arguments that are not altogether consistent with how they interpret "market forces" from one anonymous commentor. Again, how about just a made-up pseudonym? "Jefferson Madison" or "Damn Good Point" or something. Your boss ain't gonna know who you are.
I think one way of reconciling my confusion is just to note that, in the latest comment, we're just talking about the one company/daycare, whereas the original comment dealt with the interrelationships of daycares. Intra versus inter. Still, if we can accept that prices need not necessarily rise with respect to demands placed on benefits, is there also a concern for the squeeze on prices for the n-subs daycares when faced with subs daycare competition?
Or, is it just that the more foundational principle is the separation of public and private?
Then, why not make the n-subs daycares exclusive to public service employees, a benefit for them on behalf of the government employing them? Because it would mean more (of my) money being taken by the government, to pay for the added benefits?
Now, why would we assume that more money would be needed, when "market forces" or "supply and demand" do not automatically mean prices increase?
Because these quaint concepts do not apply to the state, but to the private?
Again, unclear on the nature of the argument.
Nikki makes a good point concerning the drive to increase childcare coming mostly from white, middle class people.
That does not mean they should be the only ones who benefit. With childcare being the issue of the week, we have an oppurtunity to discuss the reality of childcare and the working poor.
It's a big issue and leads to an even bigger-one that all of us are hinting at. You can't empty the public till for the things you want (tennis courts, parks (skate or otherwise), historic property) but then grab your toys and run home when it comes to protecting the public welfare.
Are we a community or just a collection of people? Are we really willing to collect our own public benefits and then refuse to help the most needy?
Nikki makes a good point concerning the drive to increase childcare coming mostly from white, middle class people.
They're the ones who have time to go to a rally.
Nikki makes a good point concerning the drive to increase childcare coming mostly from white, middle class people.
Have to agree with that.
It would make more sense to me if the university would use its resources, and deem it part of its educational mission to establish community based day care centers where low income children (read "projects") could mix with the university offspring.
I can envision a model that would collaborate with Athens Tech to use this daycare center as a training center for childcare professionals.
Having spent about three decades working with other people's personal finances, the absolute truth of the matter is that when children are involved, if the second parent is working and making $25,000 or less, and paying for childcare, that parent is not "making" any money. Financially, the family would be as well off if that parent quit and stayed home. Unfortunately, the two income family has become the "norm", and regardless of how the numbers crunch, people are adamant that they are "getting ahead" with two incomes.
It would make more sense to me if the university would use its resources, and deem it part of its educational mission to establish community based day care centers where low income children (read "projects") could mix with the university offspring.
How much money do y'all think most university employees make? Are you just thinking of faculty? Much of the staff is low-income.
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