www.newrivervalley.com

MATT GENTRY The Roanoke Times

Nyoka Stanley interacts with (from left) Oliver Raboteau, Jackson Howland and Tyler Pearce at Rainbow Riders Childcare Center in Blacksburg. Child care in the New River Valley is more scarce than it has ever been.

MATT GENTRY The Roanoke Times

Children enjoy playtime at Rainbow Riders Childcare Center in Blacksburg. The center relies entirely on tuition, unlike other centers that receive funding from the town of Blacksburg, Department of Social Services, donors and families.

BLACKSBURG -- It's mid-morning at Rainbow Riders Childcare Center in Blacksburg, and seven toddlers are making a run on a collection of telephone receivers strewn across the Orange Room's brightly colored carpet.

Shunning the books and baby dolls that fill nearby crates, Luke Poff reaches for a phone, lifts it to his ear and grins.

He has reason to be happy -- and not just because of the toys.

Luke occupies one of the most in-demand spots in the New River Valley: He's a toddler with full-time child care.

For years, full-day care at licensed centers such as Rainbow Riders has been a scarce commodity in the region. But now, experts say, the situation is heading for a crisis.

While the community continues to grow, child-care resources have started to dwindle. In the past six months, four centers have closed or announced they will close. A couple more are rumored to be contemplating a similar move.

In an effort to address -- and bring attention to -- the decline, the New River Valley Coalition for Children and Families has begun rallying together child-care providers, holding forums and encouraging a strategic approach to advocacy. The problems providers face are huge, from the high cost of care and tricky business model to the growing demand and lack of community awareness.

"What our coalition is concerned with is how much further are we going to go in crisis in this community before the bottom falls out?" said Kristi Snyder, coalition member and Rainbow Riders administrator. "And what happens to our local economy if the child-care centers can't remain open?"

By all accounts, the gap between the amount of child care available and the amount needed is as wide as it's ever been.

According to numbers compiled by employees of the Work/Life Resources office at Virginia Tech, there are currently 19 child care centers in Montgomery County. Collectively, these centers can provide full-day care for 1,006 children, from infants to pre-kindergarten age. Licensed family child-care providers have space for roughly 80 more.

And, while it's unclear how many families in the county require full-day care, statistics from the Virginia Child Care Resource and Referral Network list 4,069 children younger than 5 in the county in 2006.

"There already are not enough slots, there's no question about that," said Cathy Jacobs, coalition member and Work/Life Resources director. "But it feels like it's getting worse and it feels like it's not just gradual -- it's like a leap, a downward leap, in terms of availability of slots."

And as more child-care providers close, the centers that remain face increased pressure to accept more children.

"Every day we get calls from people or people stopping in and it becomes difficult when people come in in tears because 'my child-care center is closing' or 'my baby sitter said her last day is Friday,'" Snyder said. "Families are thrown into these crisis situations ... and we're just stuck."

Limited by staffing requirements and the high cost of care, operators of existing child-care centers are often forced to turn families away in droves. Rainbow Riders, for example, has a waiting list of 800 to 900 people looking for full-time child care.

Among them is Giles County resident Alicia McGee.

McGee, who has a 2-year-old and a 4-year-old, said she first put her name on the Rainbow Riders waiting list two months before her first child was born.

"I had always been told by people that you need to get on before the child is born because there's a big crunch for good day cares," McGee said. "I stayed home for the first year [after the baby was born] and then felt ... I'd be able to get in the day care that I'd been on the waiting list for over a year for."

Four and a half years later, however, spots for the McGee children still haven't opened up.

And McGee, who works for Montgomery County Public Schools, has made other arrangements. Her kids are now happily enrolled at Blacksburg Day Care and Child Development Center.

"These days, most people need two incomes, and if you can't find a place that's a good place for your children, you can't describe the amount of stress," she said.

So why aren't more people stepping up to meet demand from families like the McGees?

Well, for one thing, child-care providers say, there's no money in it.

"I'll take 50 cents," said Katy St. Marie, executive director of Valley Interfaith Child Care Center. "We're constantly worried about payroll, about how we're going to make it through the rest of the fiscal year."

Snyder has similar concerns.

And unlike Valley Interfaith, which is nonprofit and receives funding from the town of Blacksburg, Department of Social Services, donors and families, Rainbow Riders relies entirely on tuition.

"I'm trying to keep it affordable for the families, but pay the staff a livable wage and it's an impossible mathematical problem," Snyder said.

The business typically breaks even, but this past year, she said, it suffered "a fairly significant loss," largely because of costs associated with re-accreditation.

The rigors -- and financial burden -- of operating a day care are nothing new.

At a recent meeting hosted by the Coalition for Children and Families, St. Marie spoke to 14 women who worked or were interested in child development.

"None of us is doing this for the money," she said as the other child-care providers in the room nodded. "Because there isn't any."

Throughout the luncheon, the women discussed problems St. Marie and Snyder have been hearing for years, including: an inability to meet the community's demand for care; the pressing need for well-trained employees; and a lack of community awareness.

But while many of these issues have been around for a while, Jacobs thinks available child-care resources are now reaching a "tipping point."

Many members of the baby boomer generation who run centers are starting to retire and there are fewer young people interested in taking their place, Jacobs said. On top of that, she added, more women are entering the work force who will need child-care services in coming years.

Virginia Tech, the region's largest employer, is already feeling the crunch. In fact, it's been studying the problem since the early 1980s.

"We have lots of corroboration that child care is a massive issue, as well as anecdotal evidence," said Patricia Hyer, associate provost for academic administration. "I have people coming to me saying, 'I can't come back to work; there's no place for me to put my baby.' "

For Tech, the lack of adequate child care has increasingly become a hindrance in efforts to recruit and retain faculty and staff.

"We are in the business of identifying talent, nurturing talent and trying to get them to invest in Virginia Tech," Hyer said. "They come increasingly in packages, and we have to deal with the fact that those highly qualified, well-trained couples have got to have high-quality care or they can't do the kind of work that we're asking them to do."

While many universities across the country have built child-care centers -- and in some cases, multiple centers -- Hyer said Tech has "not had a sense that we can raise money for a building right now."

In 2005, Tech began offering full-day child care at what was once a laboratory school. But with only about 41 spaces, the Virginia Tech Child Development Center for Learning and Research is just "step one," Hyer said.

In another effort to address the need, the university is working to develop a relationship with either a new or existing center that would provide Tech with a certain number of child-care slots in exchange for a $100,000 a year subsidy.

"The hope would be that they'd give us enough slots that it would be a dent in the problem," Hyer said. "I hope it would be several hundred."

She said the university wants to secure a contract on that in the next month or two.

A similar program was established a few years ago between the College of Engineering and Rainbow Riders. As a result, the center gives the college priority placement for some of its spaces.

College administrators, Hyer noted, "believe very strongly that it's made a difference for them in a couple of hires."

Jacobs hopes other employers will soon reach the same conclusion.

"The awareness that we have to bring to people is ... that child care is going to be absolutely essential for the businesses to function ... that it's not a profit maker ... and therefore, we're going to need to have other funding sources," she said.

Jacobs' office is now compiling data to support this and plans to begin talking to businesses about the importance of child care this summer.

In the meantime, Snyder and St. Marie said they are doing all they can to keep the problem from getting worse.

"We need everybody to succeed," said Snyder. And "that's one thing our coalition is trying to look at, is how to support these local programs that are struggling so that they can get out of the struggle mode."