BATTLE CREEK, Mich. — A Battle Creek childcare center is able to provide free services to low-income families through a number of community partners putting their heads together to try to fix the growing number of childcare centers shutting down.
While the number of childcares shutting down in Michigan is slowing down since the pandemic, there are still a lot of centers still closing their doors. According to the Michigan Department of Licensing and Regulatory Affairs, from April 2020 to April 2022, 548 in-home family daycares shut their doors and 36 childcare centers did the same.
Being aware of these statistics, different community partners in Battle Creek are doing their best to help keep centers open and provide childcare services to low income families.
4-year-olds from across the Battle Creek area are able to attend a unique childcare center housed inside the New Harvest Christian Center, lead by program director Pastor Ivan Lee.
"One thing about our program, we charge the parents absolutely nothing," Pastor Lee said.
Multiple community partnerships have made this program possible, including Michigan's Great Start Readiness Program (GSRP), the W.K. Kellogg Foundation and BC Pulse.
“We really focus on ensuring that children and families have access to high quality, early care and education opportunities leading to success in kindergarten and a safe place for kids to be while their families are working," W.K. Kellogg Foundation program officer Megan Russell Johnson said.
A lot of this work is done through data gathering and community engagement by BC Pulse.
"We use data as an organization to try and understand where the need is, then that need is identified. Then we connect with community partners and say, what are we going to do about it," Pulse founder and co-executive director Kathy Szenda Wilson said.
Pulse is a project through the W. E. Upjohn Institute. They help local businesses, leaders and corporations invest in the areas that need childcare services the most.
"Education is the great equalizer and if we really want to create environments and communities where we all thrive, we need to start with our youngest children," Szenda Wilson added.
Pulse instills the work of people like Dr. Jianping Shen, a Western Michigan University professor, data partner and evaluator. Dr. Shen and his team found that from 2013 to 2022 in Battle Creek, kindergarten readiness increased from about 15 percent to 51 percent in both reading and math. 51 percent is slightly higher than the national average.
Battle Creek Public Schools... by WXMI
“The poverty level in the neighborhood, in the community is twice as much, but we achieved as much as the national average or slightly higher. So this is actually a great success against all odds," Dr. Shen said.
Now that kindergarten readiness is up, Pulse and the other community partners are working on tackling yet another childcare issue.
"One of our biggest challenges right now is a workforce," Szenda Wilson said.
They say state funding has helped but more work needs to be done to attract more talent back into the field.
“I'm hopeful that we're at this build awareness stage and moving to action, because we've been screaming about it for years for at least a decade, and other people have been doing it for longer. I think now is the time to actually act and you can no longer sit on the sidelines and say it's somebody else's responsibility," Szenda Wilson said.
The Harvest Learning Center is currently fully booked, but you can find other childcare centers and other resources through GSRP and LARA.
