A dark-haired toddler pushed two toy trains around a plate, ignoring the cheese cubes he was supposed to be eating for his afternoon snack. Moments earlier, he had stood empty-handed in the middle of the playroom at the Knee High Cooperative Daycare, one of two cooperative IU campus day care centers that will be closing in August 2018 following a decision that all IU child care centers must be nationally accredited.
"Where's Thomas?” the boy, Sven Weitnauer, had asked anxiously.
The parent and Knee High member looked at Sven, who was one of five kids between 6 months and 3 years old currently at the center.
Although the toy he wanted was not actually Thomas the Tank Engine, day care member Steve Chaplin knew what he meant.
“Let’s go look in the nap room,” Chaplin said, motioning across the hall. “I think we left it on the cot.”
Sven crossed into the dark room and found the cot with his name labeled above it. There were two trains, one red and one green, lying between the blankets. He ran back out, waving them around.
“He is infatuated with trains," Chaplin said.
Co-op members, those who bring their children to the day care like Chaplin does, get to know the children through their required shifts each week.
Chaplin and his wife, Sarah Mincey, an academic specialist in the School of Public and Environmental Affairs, have a 1-year-old son who attends the center, as well as a daughter who attended when she was young enough.
There are currently five campus child care centers for IU faculty, staff and students. Three of them are traditional, nationally accredited day care centers run by child care professionals: Campus Children’s Center, Campus View Child Care Center and Hoosier Courts Nursery School.
The two cooperative centers, Knee High and Sunflower Cooperative Daycare, are parent-run, giving families a heavily discounted price compared to traditional day care options.
At Knee High, parents, including Mincey and Chaplin, must work at the center a combined total of 10 hours a week. Children from ages 6 months to around 4 years can attend, and each family has an additional job to help the center run, such as University liaison, recruitment of new families or maintenance. There are also student assistants that work at the center.
This staff structure helps keep costs low. The current rate at Knee High is $250 per month, per child, according to its website. The traditional child care centers on campus cost more than $200 per week, according to information from each center's website.
As the co-ops are closing, Campus Children’s Center is expanding. The three traditional centers have waitlists that parents are recommended to put their child on as soon as they find out they’re pregnant, said Michelle Moyd, a former Knee High parent. Families from the co-ops will be given priority for open spots at the other centers on campus.
In a letter to the Knee High and Sunflower families Aug. 25, Provost Lauren Robel said that questions about whether the University should continue to support cooperative day care began in 2010.
In July 2016, the state determined that the co-ops needed to become licensed or serve a lower number of families so that they would be exempted from becoming licensed, Robel wrote.
“We feel it’s our obligation as an institution to try and expand our child care services and make sure they are licensed and accredited,” said Catherine Dyar, the chief of staff for the provost.
The co-ops became state licensed, but following the decision that they must also be nationally accredited, families were told in June that the co-ops will be closing next year, Dyar said.
State licensing is primarily concerned with safety requirements, while national accreditation assures quality measures for teachers and continuity of care are met, Dyar said.
For the co-ops to become accredited, they would have to significantly change how they run. Most notably, they would need to have one consistent, full-time staff member, Dyar said.
“We need to make sure we have every assurance that we are providing the best child care,” Dyar said.
Mincey said there’s no serious study comparing accredited centers and co-ops, but she prefers the co-op model because she intimately knows and trusts the people caring for her children.
She said she’s frustrated because Knee High families feel they have met several levels of requirements from the University and state that are in place to ensure a high quality of care.
“Parents are engaged in their child’s care, and no one has a stronger incentive to make sure the quality of care is highest than the parents,” Mincey said.
Mincey said the affordability, absence of a waitlist now and when she joined, the ability to be intimately involved with her children’s child care and the community at Knee High appealed to her when looking at child care options at IU.
“The benefit I had no idea I would ever treasure so much was the community that I gained by working alongside 10 other families that had young children that were also academics dealing with the same social, familial issues that I was dealing with,” Mincey said.
Moyd’s daughter attended Knee High but switched to Hoosier Courts when she turned 3. Moyd said Hoosier Courts is the perfect place for her daughter now, but she doesn’t have the same level of investment as she did at Knee High.
“It’s a community,” Moyd said. “I feel like IU is missing an opportunity to hold up one of its institutions that has a particular historical importance.”
Moyd is a member of the Bloomington Faculty Council Child Care Coalition, which advises Tim Dunnuck, the director of Early Childhood Education Services. She said the coalition hasn’t been consulted on the decision, even though Robel said in her letter that her office has looked into issues with the co-op model for at least seven years.
Having campus child care that parents feel comfortable taking their kids to makes for a better workforce, Moyd said. She said given the number of employees IU has, it seems that it could have more child care options.
“People need day care options, and that model can work for families who have flexible schedules and are able to do the work and pay some money, but not a ton of money,” Moyd said.
Families from Knee High met with Dyar recently to talk about their concerns about the co-ops' closing, and they are working to build a network of members of the community to speak about what Knee High has meant to them, Moyd said.
Amy Cornell, director of student services in the Media School, has a son who is now 19, but he began attending Knee High in 1998. There were some challenges getting all of the families to agree on how to raise kids, she said, but all of the parents tended to be liberal.
"I believe that most of those arguments or discussions were for the best," Cornell said. "They taught me a lot about people and kids and raising kids."
Parents have the option to continue the co-op model off campus if they want, Dyar said, but Cornell said that would defeat the purpose of the co-ops' affordability.
“Nostalgia isn’t worth keeping it open, but affordability is,” Cornell said.
