Olympic College, considering options to keep its child care center afloat, decides against outsourcing

After three years of financial losses and rapidly declining enrollment at Olympic College's Sophia Bremer Early Learning Academy, staff and parents of children enrolled at the center were told in June that the college was considering outsourcing its operation.

The prospect of a third party taking over the center worried the parents of those enrolled, which dropped to just 29 kids during the 2021-2022 school year.

Anna Smallbeck was one of those parents.

"It's a big deal to me that focus on the privatization on the outsourcing is not about the learning aspect of it. It's only about the child care aspect of it," said Smallbeck, whose daughter, Juniper, started at the center last school year. Her husband, Samuel, is a student at the school.

After weeks of being in limbo regarding the future of child care on campus as college leaders wrestled with declining funding and how to bring on more child care workers in the midst of a nationwide shortage, parents finally heard from OC earlier this month that care would not be contracted out to a third party.

To that end, OC officials announced their intent to hire a new permanent director — a position that has been vacant for months — and additional teachers.

The decision to keep SBELA under OC management came after years of financial loss and declining enrollment at the center. According to data from Olympic College, SBELA served 126 children during the 2018-2019 school year. After two years of navigating school during the COVID-19 pandemic, SBELA served just 29 kids during the 2021-2022 school year.

In late May, the school published an impact assessment that identified contracting with a third-party operator as one option to keep SBELA financially solvent. The prospect of Olympic College contracting out the center, or part of it, to a third party raised fears about the quality of education at SBELA for parents like Smallbeck.

Contracting with a third party also posed a large unknown to Deborah Kong, the program coordinator at SBELA. Leaving operations to a third-party vendor, like OC did with its bookstore, presented an uncertain future to the teachers who spend years with the SBELA students. It wasn't clear if the teachers there now would stay under new ownership, she said.

“The unknown is terrifying for the teachers who work in this building because they have relationships with these kids,” Kong said.

At the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, SBELA shut its doors as classes went online. The center lost kids, teaching positions and a permanent director during that time. Those positions remained unfilled, and Kong had not heard about hiring plans until the notice of a meeting on July 7.

Kong said she and the teachers reacted to the school's decision with relief.

“This isn't a Band-aid they're slapping on the problem," he said. "This is a real future and that makes me happy."

The school has identified internal funding from the college's office of instruction as well as additional grants (including a Washington State Department of Children, Youth & Families Stabilization grant) to keep the center operating at Olympic College, according to OC spokesman Shawn Devine.

After leaving the meeting on July 7, Kong spent the rest of her morning calling parents and telling them about SBELA’s future.

“It’s nice to be able to tell them: We’re staying. It got solved,” she said.

Increasing deficits during decreased enrollment

The Sophia Bremer Early Learning Academy (originally the Sophia Bremer Child Development Center) opened in 2010 after a $2.5 million donation from the Bremer Trust. College officials initially estimated that the 16,500-square-foot center could serve 96 children at a time.

Kong said that when Olympic College closed to in-person services in 2020, there was a quick decline in staffing and enrollment at the child care center.

The child care center staff is currently a small team, including an interim director, program coordinator, food services provider, teachers and hourly substitute teachers. The center is open to the public and offers Monday through Friday care for children or part-time care on select days.

Olympic College students receive a 20% discount at SBELA, which offers full-time care for infants, toddlers and preschoolers at anywhere between $800 and $960 per month. The average monthly cost in Washington for child care (full time), according to ChildCare Aware, a referral and advocacy group, is $1,044 per child. Olympic College is one of 20 community and technical colleges in the state that offer child care services.

In two of the last five fiscal years, SBELA has experienced increasing deficits amid declining college enrollment. Sources of funding for the center — including grants, state subsidies, student fees and COVID emergency relief funds — are all expected to decrease in the coming school years. Total revenue for the center has declined from nearly $1.2 million before the pandemic to just $471,147 in 2021-2022 projections. Deficits are occurring, the school’s impact assessment states, largely because of declining enrollment at Olympic College.

According to the Washington State Board for Community and Technical Colleges, Olympic College’s enrollment has declined for the past five school years. While 11,552 students were enrolled in the 2017-2018 school year, only 7,365 students took classes in the 2021-2022 school year.

“These downward trends are not expected to shift until after 2025 and are predicted to improve slowly,” the school wrote in an impact assessment for outsourcing the child care center at Olympic College. Recent data from the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center found that community colleges have lost more than 827,000 students since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Public school child care programs — like SBELA at Olympic College— have also decreased in the past decade. According to a 2021 analysis of U.S. Department of Education data, community colleges across the country experienced the steepest decline in child care service offerings.

And in Washington state, 46,300 community and technical college students, almost one-quarter of the community college population, are parents of dependent children. More than 22% of students at Olympic College are parents of dependent children.

'It made my life easier'

Smallbeck and Samuel Hayden, a student at Olympic College, started sending their daughter to SBELA in the fall of 2021. Hayden enrolled in 2020, when he and Smallbeck were both at home caring for their daughter. But once she was able to start care at SBELA, things changed for their family.

“So it is something that as a resource, I loved it. I was happy with it. It made my life easier. It made his life easier. And then it gave him a couple hours too, to, like, 'Oh, I have some time to clean up the house or I have some time to do my homework,'” Anna said of Sam.

SBELA was a great service for their family, but Smallbeck didn’t want to see it fade after years of financial decline. Smallbeck’s concern was that outsourcing the center would lead to a diminished quality of education.

“She hasn’t been there that long, but she has learned a lot in the time that she has been there,” Smallbeck said.

When Kong started working at the Sophia Bremer Early Learning Academy, before the pandemic, there was a full-time director, family health advocate and “about 17 teachers and teaching assistants and student workers.” That number has declined in recent years, according to the school's impact assessment.

Even as the number of children enrolled in SBELA declined over the last three school years, there are still more than 100 currently on the waitlist, according to Brendon Taga, vice president of student services at Olympic College. But Kong says the lack of teacher capacity is preventing the college from bringing in more kids.

"It’s not that the need’s not there. The need is there. There’s no staff,” she said.

Next steps

Taga stepped into the SBELA interim director role in mid-March. The hiring at SBELA, he says, is impacted by the larger trends of college enrollment and an increase in demand for child care.

“So as we’ve faced staffing challenges, we've also had challenges to generate revenue because that's directly tied to the number of classes that we can open and the number of children and families that we can serve,” Taga said.

The number of child care providers in Kitsap County has also declined by 18 since 2017, even as the capacity for children has remained relatively stable. In Washington state, according to a 2021 report from the Washington State Professional Educator Standards Board, early childhood educator positions are experiencing some of the greatest shortages in the state.

Taga says the center has typically relied on grant funding and fees, and contracting the center out was one option the school pursued. Both Taga and Martin Cavalluzzi, president of Olympic College, emphasized that the school was always committed to keeping the school open.

“We know that child care has a greater impact on community college students being able to access and achieve their educational goals,” Taga said. “And that’s the reason why we have made a decision at Olympic College to be committed to providing that service on campus.”

Cavalluzzi added: “We’re a hundred percent committed to providing child care, that’s never been a question whether or not we were going to do it. We are going to do it,”

The school is now working to hire a permanent director and fill open teaching positions, according to Devine. Kong and the SBELA staff are now waiting to welcome back more students, hopefully by the end of next fall.

“We have a great big building and I really wish that it was full of kids,” Kong said.

This article originally appeared on Kitsap Sun: OC decides against outsourcing as it looks to keep childcare center afloat