Nearly two years after Northwestern designated the Evanston McGaw YMCA Child Care Center as the preferred childcare center for its Evanston Campus, 83 children of NU faculty, staff and students make up 25 percent of the center’s total enrollment. And NU is following suit by using KinderCare to provide childcare service to its Chicago Campus employees beginning early 2005.
Senior Vice President for Business and Finance Eugene Sunshine said the university’s current partnership with the McGaw YMCA, 1420 Maple Ave., arose out of a demand for expansion of NU’s previous childcare program, which provided only income-based subsidies to NU employees.
“We decided we would try to take a more active role in arranging for childcare than just helping to pay for it,” Sunshine said.
NU designated the YMCA as its preferred childcare program provider in October 2002 and added a $50,000 scholarship program for employees whose children enrolled at the YMCA.
Anitra Young, a benefits counselor in Human Resources, said her 9-year-old daughter began participating in the McGaw YMCA’s after school program in 2003. She said the partnership reserved space in each of the YMCA’s programs for the children of NU employees and students.
“One of the biggest challenges with the YMCA is availability,” she said. “The slots fill up quickly. The partnership with the university opened up so many spots for NU children.”
NU also supplemented the YMCA’s 2003-04 fine arts program, sponsoring a part-time art teacher and music teacher and a fine arts festival. Young said these initiatives enriched her daughter’s experience.
“I think that my daughter is being exposed to a lot more because of the relationship than the YMCA would expose her to if they were just doing the programs on their own,” Young said.
KinderCare will serve a similar function. Kanella Maniatis, a childcare consultant at Action for Children, which currently helps NU’s Chicago Campus employees find childcare programs, wrote in an e-mail that 79 percent of employees her company served between Oct. 1, 2003 and March 31, 2004 sought infant or toddler care near the Chicago Campus.
“The demand for the Chicago Campus employees is for infant/toddler childcare, yet the childcare options in the area are very small and unable to serve the majority of the employees,” Maniatis wrote.
The program’s start date and weekly costs have not been finalized yet, said Joanne Rusina, senior director of KinderCare at Work, a national service which provides childcare for the University of Utah, University of Florida and the University of Kentucky, among other institutions.
Sunshine said NU will provide deeper subsidies for employee parents who enroll their kids in the Kindercare program due to steeper costs.
“Chicago costs more in terms of what they charge for childcare,” he said. “We will provide a level of subsidy, again based on income, so that Chicago parents will end up paying no more than Evanston parents, based on level of income. The net amount is the same, that’s what what we’re after.”
Chris Hart, vice president of the McGaw YMCA, said he expects more NU families to enroll in YMCA programs as the partnership continues, pointing out that enrollment is up from 52 in 2002-03.
“A number of families were already utilizing care within the community, so in the first two or three years you will not see the whole volume being handled by the YMCA,” he said.
Some NU parents decided against the YMCA. Visiting assistant political science Prof. Elizabeth Hurd placed her two-year-old daughter in private care. She called the program “prohibitively expensive” because she and her husband, assistant political science Prof. Ian Hurd, do not receive subsidies from NU. Also, the YMCA does not offer part-time infant care and is not located on campus, she said.
“What we’re really looking for is an on-campus facility, just something that’s on par with what other universities of NU’s caliber offer,” Hurd said. “It’s a little bit surprising and disappointing that NU doesn’t.”
Sunshine said on-campus childcare is unfeasible due to space shortages and the lack of an extensive teacher education program that other large schools use to feed into their childcare centers. He said NU’s current arrangement with the McGaw YMCA provided the best possible short-term solution for parents and children.
“It could be that someday we have our own center right on campus,” he said. “But certainly for people who want center-based childcare, the (YMCA) is very advantageous for us. It provides more and better services more quickly.”
