The Good-bye Window: A Year in the Life of a Day-Care Center

Epilogue

EPILOGUE On a rainy Saturday afternoon in April 1997, some of the parents and teachers of Red Caboose have gathered at Luke House, a local soup kitchen. Most of the board members are here, along with an ex-board member, Lynn, and a number of teachers - Gary Dosemagen and Cheryl Heiman from the center, Neil Skinner and Lee Lohr from after-school. And, of course, Wendy. They sit, for once, in adult-size chairs at round tables in a room where meals are served each week to some of Madison's poor and homeless. Everyone 's brought something to eat, from bagels and cream cheese to nori rolls. The center is celebrating its 25th anniversary this year, and the subject of today's discussion is where Red Caboose should be heading-philosophically and practically-over the next 25 years. Twenty-five years is cause for celebration, but it's no guarantee for the future. The problems faced by centers like Red Caboose today-how to pay teachers a living wage, how to keep the quality of care high, how to stay affordable for parents-will become more acute, not less, in the years to come. Welfare reform in Wisconsin and nationwide will make finding and paying for good child care even more challenging than it is now for the poor and the working poor. In my year at Red Caboose, I learned about what makes a good child-care center successful and what obstacles it's up against. At first, each day I spent observing was exciting. Then it became tedious, the same routines over and over. Toward the end of my time in each room a whole new level of experience opened up. Once I got past both the novelty and the boredom ofhfe with young children, I came to care much more than I thought possible about the way those lives were being shaped, right before my eyes. The most important thing I came away with was the abiding sense that what happens day in and day out at a place like Red Caboose matters. All the 241 Copyrighted Material 242 EPILOGUE rhetoric in the world is nowhere near as convincing as the experience ofwatching young children every day. And if it matters, we have to say so. We have to acknowledge that each day in the life of a child is meaningful, and then we have to confront the uncomfortable fact that as a society we treat our youngest children as throwaways even while we pay lip service to the notion of education . It is profoundly ironic that we obsess about the physical dangers of child care-the rare instances of abuse or neglect-but turn a blind eye to more common consequences: Lack of compassion. Inability to care about others. Low self-esteem. Apathy. Despair. We know what good child care looks like: well-paid, well-trained teachers, low staffturnover, good teacher-child ratios, small group sizes. We know what it takes to create good child care: more money than parents can pay. And we know that millions of American kids, caught in the political crossfire, don't have it. The Left touts child care as an ideal, ignoring the reality that much of that care is not good enough. The Right touts stay-at-home moms, ignoring the fact that many parents have to work. This country will never embrace a national model of child care, writes psychologist Sandra Scarr, "largely because mothers are not to be encouraged to work:' 1 Red Caboose and other centers succeed in doing good work with children despite, not because of, the decisions and policies we as a nation have put in place. With the things I had seen and learned fresh in my mind, I went to the experts for their solutions, their vision ofwhere we could and should go next. British pediatrician Penelope Leach is an outspoken critic of child care as it exists today, especially for the "under-threes," infants and toddlers. In her book Children First, Leach envisions a "child-place" in every community, where parents could drop by with infants and get to know other at-home parents, where toddlers and preschoolers would be cared for and educated, where school-age children could spend the hours between school dismissal and parents ' arrival home. Children could make friends of all ages; grown-ups could find the companionship and stimulation to make them better caregivers for their own and other people's children; single parents and...