Walsh administration to provide aid, grants to independent day care providers

Mayor Martin Walsh last week announced outlined his administration’s plan to support independent day care providers in light of a survey that found most Boston residents find that day care is too expensive.

“It’s really important for us to make sure we make advances and make sure we have high quality child care here in the city of Boston,” Walsh said, “and also help small businesses, especially women  — as you know, it’s a heavily female field — be able to create, be entrepreneurs and succeed, and be successful here in this economy that we have in this city.”

The survey, a project of the Mayor’s Office of Women’s Advancement and the Economic Mobility Lab, was included in the annual citywide resident census last February. The survey report, titled “Making Childcare Work,” was also announced last week.

The new Childcare Entrepreneur Fund that Walsh announced as a response to the survey results will allocate $70,000 in grants to home-based child care businesses as part of the fund’s pilot program. Most grants will be between $1,000 to $3,000, with one $10,000 grant allocated to a business that collaborates with one or more other businesses to reduce costs through shared resources such as purchasing supplies in bulk or collaborating in accounting and bookkeeping.

Speaking after the press conference, Johanny Bobadilla, a long time at-home day care provider at My First Steps Family Childcare, said that is not enough.

“If [the grant]’s for someone like me, who’s paying for rent, utilities, it’s not very much, $2,000,” she said. “Definitely not. And remember that we work 10 hours a day. But our pay is not by the hour. It’s a pay set by the voucher, so it’s very little money and lots of work hours.”

Vanessa Calderón-Rosado, chief executive officer of Inquilinos Boricuas en Acción, said the grants may be modest, but that it’s a “good start” for a pilot program.

Bobadilla said a better reform would be requiring that child care providers be paid hourly. Many currently are not.

“I think that home educators deserve hourly pay, because we work for very long hours,” she said. “We work with children of different ages, from 2 months old to 4 or 5 years old, when they go to school. We have to use strategies to be able to develop all of the stages of all the different ages and to address the necessities of each one of the kids. If they give us better pay, we would be able to employ more people and we would work better and more comfortably.”

Bobadilla also cited vacations, personal days, training for teachers and better benefits packages as urgent needs.

“I have an associate’s degree and we’re always training and building capacity to be in compliance on regulations,” she said. “So we’re responsible like any other program, and should have better benefits

Despite insufficient support, however, providers like Bobadilla show no sign of quitting in favor of easier work. “Our work is beautiful, and we do it with love, but it’s very unrecognized,” she said.

The deadline for applying for a Childcare Entrepreneur Fund grant is Nov. 15.

The “Making Childcare Work” report is available at: www.boston.gov.