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Quality Day Care Involves Families in the Community
The better centers with long-term employees inspire loyalty in their parents and happiness in kids

By Linda Baker, Special to The Oregonian

On a warm spring afternoon, Dalya Meyer, 3-1/2, and her friend Vanessa are playing on the jungle gym at the Fruit & Flower Child Care Center in Northwest Portland.

“We have pictures of them crawling together at six months,” Dalya’s mom, Erika Meyer, says. The long-term relationships her daughter has developed at Fruit & Flower are one of the best things about the childcare center, Meyer says.

Continuity among families and teachers are two important characteristics of high quality day care, says Merrily Haas, executive director of the Oregon Association for the Education of Young children. In a field characterized by high turnover, some of Portland’s most popular child care centers stand out for the longevity of their staff – as well as the families who go there.

At Fruit & Flower, Oregon’s oldest day care, teachers have an average of 12 years work experience. Two of the lead teachers are 20-year Fruit & Flower veterans.

At Child Peace Montessori School downtown, staff members have seven to 11 years’ experience. The head and associate teachers at Mittleman Jewish Community Center day care have been at the Southwest Portland center for 17 and 11 years respectively.

“Low staff turnover is very important so kids can build stable relationships,” says one Mittleman mother, whose son has attended the Mittleman center for 2-1/2 years. April Streeter, whose younger son is the second of two siblings to attend Child Peace, says she has seen the same faces at the center every day for the past five years. Both of her kids also had the same teacher at child Peace. “That’s very reassuring,” Streeter says.
Day care centers with low staff turnover usually pay their teachers’ higher-than-average salaries as well as offer health and retirement benefits. To provide decent compensation, Haas says, these centers often charge high parent fees or receive some kind of government or nonprofit subsidy.

On the high-parent-fee end, Fruit & Flower charges $730 to $935 a month for preschoolers and infants respectively. At Mittleman, full-time care for kids 6 weeks to 3 years is $895. Child Peace charges $990 for full-time toddler care. These centers do provide some money for scholarship parents; at Fruit & Flower, for example, 20 percent of the spaces are reserved for low-income parents.

As for high quality subsidized care, Portland State University’s Helen Gordon Child Development Center charges students $410 a month for full-time toddler care. The center is partially subsidized by student fees. Ascension Early Childhood Education center in Southeast Portland, which has a church subsidy, charges about $600 a month for full-time toddler care.

Low family turnover and strong relationships between families at a given center are also indicators of quality, parents say. Whether it’s Teddy Bear picnics, after-hours potlucks or fund-raising events, a good child-care center will provide ways for parents and children to connect with each other – inside and outside of school.
“Some of the families we’re closest with we met here,” says Richard Meyer, whose daughter Dalya is the second of his two kids to attend Fruit & Flower. Just last weekend, Meyer adds, he and his wife and children had dinner with another Fruit & Flower family. “It’s important that the community here isn’t transient,” he says. It makes is feel comfortable leaving our kids.”

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