The Rise of the ‘Carebnb’: Is This Home-Based Model the Future of the Childcare Industry? – By Belinda Luscombe (TIME) / Oct 21 2020
For the past six years, Brittany Schultz has been a kindergarten teacher in the Denver public school system. On May 28, she left, and on June 15, she opened Ms. Brittany’s Village day care in her home in Commerce City, Colo., with her three children and one from another family. Within two months of opening, she was, she says, making the same money as she had made in a classroom but was responsible for only nine kids. She and her husband, who works with her, currently earn about $5,000 a month.
Schultz is a peppy, can-do woman with the indefatigable good cheer and focus that are key to working with little kids. But even for the very energetic, to go from zero to opening a childcare center in a matter of weeks is remarkable. The licensing procedures and safety requirements are significant, and can require home renovations. Opening your own business in the teeth of a pandemic shutdown takes some guts. And many teachers, especially those with graduate degrees like Schultz, have historically shunned a change of profession to what many see as babysitting. Home-based centers are often regarded as the used-car yards of the U.S. childcare ecosystem: the place people go when they can’t afford anywhere else, which may be why the number of fully licensed operations has more than halved in the past 15 years, from almost 200,000 to 86,000.
One of the reasons Schultz was able to move so swiftly was that she had joined a childcare franchise known as MyVillage, a Colorado startup that matches parents with caregivers, eHarmony-style, and takes care of a lot of the administrative work, like billing and insurance. MyVillage is one of a growing number of companies—usually with reassuring names like Wonderschool, WeeCare or NeighborSchools—that are trying to use technology to transform the day-care industry by creating more home-based care centers, and improving the reputation and profitability of the ones that already exist. Childcare veterans warn that they have a steep climb ahead of them.
About 7 million children under the age of 5 are cared for in someone’s home, according to the 2016 National Survey of Early Care and Education. About 4 million of them are looked after by a relative. The other 3 million are in a home day care. Despite the number of children they care for, however, these home-based day-care centers have often been overlooked-—by policymakers and legislators, parents and nonprofits—since more than 90% of them are not regulated, and it’s difficult to get a clear idea of the standard of care. Expanding and improving the sector was one of the centerpieces of the childcare-reform initiative that Ivanka Trump shepherded through the White House in December, though it stopped there.
Continue to article> https://time.com/5902291/childcare-coronavirus/
