South Hero child care facility plans to expand into Grand Isle

When the sole licensed child care center in Grand Isle shut its doors last summer, it left a gap in services felt across the Lake Champlain islands. 

Now, a South Hero child care provider is set to expand into the shuttered Grand Isle facility next month. 

“It’s a good thing for the community,” said owner Carol Egan, who opened Turn to Joy in South Hero in 2020. “The additional space gives us some options that we don’t currently have.”

Turn to Joy will move its preschool program into the former Learning Adventure building on Route 314, Egan said, where it will have capacity to serve about 25 children. 

That will open up space in South Hero to accommodate additional younger students, Egan said. She plans to have three classrooms at the original site: a room for six infants; a room for eight 1-year-olds; and a room for a dozen 2-year-olds.

But, just like other child care providers across Vermont, Egan has found hiring additional staff to be a challenge. 

Egan is wrapping up renovations to the Grand Isle building, which is owned by the town. All told, she expects to spend about $25,000 of her own money on the project. In exchange, the town won’t charge Egan rent for the first two years, according to Jeff Parizo, a Grand Isle Selectboard member.

Egan said she anticipates the Grand Isle facility will be fully staffed when it opens June 15, though she still needs to hire teaching assistants for the South Hero location.

Finding those employees has been a challenge. Egan said she has posted on online job boards and asked “everyone I know” — even families in her programs — if they know anyone willing to cover shifts in South Hero.

Child care workers are leaving the profession at high rates, VTDigger has reported, in part due to low salaries and a lack of basic benefits such as health insurance. The pandemic has exacerbated these issues. 

Egan said the only benefit she is able to offer her staff is free child care. “You have to offer a competitive salary, or benefits,” she said. “You really can’t do both.”

Egan said she knows multiple families who drive significant distances to access child care services on the Champlain islands because they couldn’t find slots in more populated areas, such as Burlington and St. Albans. 

Still, islanders need more early childhood education services, according to a February report from the Burlington-based child care advocacy group Let’s Grow Kids. Fewer than 60% of Grand Isle County preschoolers have access to “high-quality, regulated child care programs,” the report stated.

Statewide, more than 50% of preschoolers lack access to these programs, according to the report. 

It found that, overall, Vermont has improved child care access for infants and toddlers over the past five years but still “lacks a sufficient supply of regulated early childhood education programs to meet demand.” 

Part of the problem in Grand Isle County — and other rural parts of Vermont — is that child care has, historically, been provided in family homes, advocates have said. And when providers retire, they often aren’t replaced.

“The concept of workforce development is talked about for lots of other kinds of fields,” Janet McLaughlin, executive director of the Vermont Association for the Education of Young Children, has told VTDigger. “But people don’t talk about it the same way, often, for early childhood education.”

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