As several childcare centers in McLean County have shut their doors since last winter, parents and families weren't the only ones left scrambling. Bloomington-Normal providers who remain open and anxious to help describe an industry where good intentions run into real financial and bureaucratic walls. But some childcare professionals are choosing to think outside the box and cooperate with each other to address the area's childcare crisis and fill needed gaps in the sector, instead of scooping up business each time another center closes.
Molly Robinson, owner and director of the newly-opened childcare center The Farmhouse, said her phone was exploding with calls moments before the news broke that Milestones Early Learning Center and Preschool in Bloomington was abruptly closing after 118 years.
Milestones' closure this month displaced roughly 80 families with about nine days' notice, and left its staff facing 6-8 weeks without pay while they wait for background checks to clear at new employers. And this is just the latest in a string of closures that pushed more displaced families into an already long line on waitlists stretching months, if not years.
If there's a silver lining, it's that efforts to help families are coming from all directions. Illinois' new Department of Early Childhood [IDEC] is gradually rolling out statewide solutions.
City and county officials are endeavoring to help, too. The City of Bloomington said there may potentially be a boost in financial assistance and creating programs to help with frequent closures.
For children in the foster care system, IDEC has new and improved data collection services to pinpoint exactly where certain children are in the system. Ali Schoon, director of public policy at the statewide child welfare nonprofit Brightpoint, said the new system will "make it so much easier to identify who these families are, where those struggles are and react accordingly."
Schoon and others are optimistic about the changes ahead under IDEC, but the transition won't happen overnight.
"It's not gonna be these massive, big changes," Schoon said. "It's gonna be a slow transition — thoughtful, meaningful transitions."
That pace is a source of frustration to some providers and parents, who need solutions now.
Some of Bloomington-Normal's "boots on the ground" childcare workers are beginning to choose collaboration over competition, seeking ways they can work together while waiting for glacial changes at the municipal and state level.
Parents panic
Tiana Haney and April Anderson-Zorn, two moms from Bloomington, have separately felt the effects of their children having no place to go after Milestones' closed.
Anderson-Zorn said she was lucky. Her daughter is starting first grade this fall after having spent several years at Milestones.
She said she received the message through the shared app used between parents and teachers that the center would close within days. With the abrupt closure on July 31, Anderson-Zorn had a vacation coincidentally lined up for the same month.
“We're scrambling for just a few weeks,” Anderson Zorn said. “And then she goes back to her routine of school and her after school care [at YMCA].’
Anderson-Zorn said if this had happened a few years ago, she would have no idea what she’d do, which is very much the situation for Haney. Her 8-month-old daughter had been enrolled in Milestones for a few months.
“It was kind of sad though because I know she was really getting to like it there and getting real comfortable,” Haney said. “Then out of nowhere it's just kind of gone so it's really hard trying to put her in another place that she's gonna like.”
Aside from the sudden change of atmosphere for her daughter, Haney said affordability and waitlists are some of her biggest concerns moving forward.
“Everyone's kind of struggling a little bit with affordability for daycares and childcare,” Haney said. “Everyone's trying to get in the same places at the same time.”
Haney said the closure has now eaten into her work schedule as she’s scrambling to find her daughter a new spot.
“If one of the grandmas aren't able to watch her, and not any of the grandpas at the time, and dad's at work — then I'm normally home,” Haney said.
Scrambling to help
Robinson said the Tuesday night Milestones announced the closure, she and her colleagues coincidentally stayed at the office a little later to get some paperwork finished.
"I was looking at our enrollment and waitlist, and I would hit ‘go back’, and then there were two more names that popped up on the waitlist," she said, thinking the glitch was related to new software just implemented.
"We had five new enrollees for our waitlist in a matter of minutes," Robinson said. "I was like, oh my God, what in the world are we going to do?" Robinson said.
Robinson said in that moment, she remembered why she even wanted to open a center in the first place: because of closures.
“We started this to be a solution to the problem of the lack of care,” Robinson said. “And before I could even get my doors open, three centers closed.”
Working to make childcare work
Ashley McAfee, a childcare worker at Little Jewels Learning Center in Bloomington, said her director came in the morning after Milestones announced its closure to six new emails from panicked parents. McAfee said she got on the phone — not to fill her own waitlist, but to call around to other centers and find out who had openings, so she'd have somewhere else to send families who couldn't get in.
McAfee worked in childcare with her grandmother for several years before finding employment at Little Jewels.
She said she noticed a "trickle effect" in the sector beginning around 2016 — closures, long waitlists, staff retention issues, unfair pay. When the COVID pandemic hit, it got even worse, she said.
"I would say 2022 is when you really felt it," McAfee said. "That's when I just felt like everybody was in the industry for the wrong reasons."
McAfee said that as a childcare worker herself, she noticed a certain passion and glow that employees once had for taking care of children had dissipated.
"In today's age, I can really see that it's just the spark isn't there," she said.
McAfee said she aims to be an advocate for the children in the childcare landscape, funneling that passion to start the process of opening her own center, Everbloom Learning Academy.
With all of the closures and concerns parents and children have been facing across several counties, McAfee said she couldn't just sit back and watch. With costs sky-high and loans hard to access, McAfee said she decided to launch a GoFundMe campaign to help open a new center.
"It was really hard to press that button," McAfee said. "What if someone thinks I am trying to scam them?"
She said she sat with that fear and ultimately decided not to go through with it, but she knows she'll need more money than she can personally afford to invest. She's already put her savings and a 37-page business plan behind it; she declined to put her family's home up as collateral for a larger loan to get there faster.
Robinson caught wind of McAfee's GoFundMe and said, at first, she was skeptical. But when McAfee showed up at The Farmhouse a few weeks ago, unsure whether she'd be welcomed into the local childcare community at all, she said Robinson was the one who put her at ease.
McAfee said Robinson immediately offered help — "anything that you need, I will help you" — because, in Robinson's words, providers "need to come together."
That contradiction captures something about how McLean County's remaining childcare providers are relating to each other right now, even as the industry around them keeps shrinking.
"My hope is that we are going to start coming together and advocating as one entity," Robinson said, adding with waitlists a mile long, there's no competition between providers in the conventional sense.
"I would talk with anybody and help them put a center together," Robinson said. "I'd be happy to sit down with you. I'm not going to sugarcoat it."
McAfee is in the middle of building EverBloom while still working fulltime at Little Jewels. Little Jewels hasn't stood in her way, McAfee said — provided she gives them notice before she leaves.
"It's really hard, that this is not a walk in the park," McAfee said her director told her. "It's going to be dark outside."
More gaps remain
Even as Illinois moves to address some of its childcare problems, some gaps are harder to fill — particularly for families whose schedules don't fit the traditional 9-to-5 workday, and for children entering foster care with little notice.
One near-term fix providers are watching closely: streamlined staff background checks, long a bottleneck for getting new hires into classrooms.
Brightpoint Director of Early Childhood Services Janice Moenster, who serves on the IDEC transition advisory committee, said consolidating operations previously housed in multiple agencies means providers and families no longer have to navigate separate systems for separate needs. Still, she cautioned that reorganization alone won't fix root causes like a shrinking teacher pipeline, stagnant pay and a lack of overnight care options — gaps that hit 2nd and 3rd shift workers, a significant population in McLean County given its manufacturing employers like Rivian.
Clete Winklemann, president and CEO of the Normal-based child welfare nonprofit The Baby Fold, agrees that IDEC draws the line in necessary priority shifts — specifically in separating childcare center licensing from the Department of Children and Family Services [DCFS] and moving it to IDEC.
“DCFS is a $2.8 billion state agency and when you're looking at daycare being one piece of a gigantic system, the focus wasn't real; the focus wasn't there,” Winklemann said. “The focus is on dealing with children who have unfortunately been victimized and have significant trauma histories and now are in the care of DCFS. That's certainly a higher priority than daycare.”
Ali Schoon of Brightpoint said after-hours care remains a major problem, particularly for parents working overnight shifts.
"There's a lack of the after hours care," Schoon said. "Especially for the business community when you have a lot of staff who are working the overnight shift."
McLean County does not have a single childcare center that offers overnight services.
Foster families left behind
For foster families, the childcare gap can create a different kind of problem.
Kirsten Johnson has fostered nearly 50 children since 2016. She and her partner both work full-time, so when they receive a placement involving a child younger than kindergarten age, they need childcare almost immediately, often for a child with special
Johnson said she has had to turn down foster placements after calling childcare centers and finding either no available spots, centers that no longer accept DCFS payments, or centers that limit the number of children they will accept through the foster-care payment system.
"If we're not able to find childcare, then we're not able to accept placement of children into our home," Johnson said.
She said that can mean children are placed outside their home communities — sometimes hours away — or that siblings who could have stayed together are placed in separate homes.
For Johnson, that's why childcare isn't just a convenience for foster families. It can determine whether a family is able to say yes to a child who needs a home.
Johnson said one of the biggest gaps is getting foster kids timely, in-person therapy for developmental delays. Wait times for an early intervention evaluation can stretch for months, she said, and after that, wait times for an actual provider can run months to years longer.
"And a lot of times when they do get offered a provider, it's a virtual provider," Johnson said.
Johnson said she has lived this, firsthand. She said she once had to run physical therapy sessions for one of her foster children over a video call, coached in real time by a therapist on the other end of the screen.
"I'm not trained to do physical therapy, even if I have a physical therapist on the computer telling me what sorts of things to do," she said.
That's part of why a model like Robinson's at the Farmhouse stands out to her — therapists coming to the center, in person, instead of families being left to patch together care on their own.
"Being in early childhood education, working as a school psychologist there, I get these reports where they're identifying these kids as having these significant delays," Johnson said. "They've received zero services because they've been on a waitlist for 18 months since they got evaluated."
By the time those kids reach preschool, she said, schools are left trying to catch them up on delays that could have been addressed years earlier, had services been available where the kids already spent their days.
'Not a walk in the park'
A center like The Farmhouse, built around bringing that kind of care on-site instead of routing families to yet another appointment, is the kind of model Johnson wishes more centers would adopt. Her family's newest foster placement is now enrolled there.
But Robinson said a months-long delay in payments from DCFS has put her already precarious business in jeopardy. A spokesperson for Illinois DFCS confirmed the delay in reimbursements to childcare centers serving foster children is due to a staffing shortage that is near resolved.
The delays and hurdles don't scare McAfee, though she doesn't expect EverBloom to be able to replicate the Farmhouse's inclusive model right away. Robinson's build-out took five years.
She said she sees opening her own center as a first step toward addressing the shortage.
"McLean County needs this," McAfee said.
