By Teri Banas

ANN ARBOR – Nine years ago Christine Harmon’s husband came home and said he didn’t want be married anymore. The next day he was gone. As a stay-at-home mom with two toddlers, she hadn’t worked outside the home in years. Harmon knew her life had just gone into crisis mode.

Someone referred her to the Child Care Network in Ann Arbor – today host to the Great Start Regional Child Care Resource Center for Southeast Michigan – and the young mom secured a grant to help pay for child care so she could accept a $25,000-a-year job as a bank clerk and pay for a modest apartment in Ypsilanti.

The grant, she said, was a lifesaver.

Today, Harmon, 40, is a well-respected bank officer in Ann Arbor who has received multiple promotions and still finds time to manage her daughter’s soccer team and coach her son’s baseball team. The family is doing just fine.

“I first went through the state but I made too much money (to qualify for government support),” she said. “So, the grant was really, really crucial. When you’re a young family, you haven’t had time to get grounded, to have money set aside, and since I hadn’t worked for a while, it was a tough situation to be thrown into.”

On the trail to quality

The nonprofit Child Care Network has been a trailblazer in the quest to help families pay for child care, enabling parents to work, go to school and build productive lives.

The Family Support Program is the first of its kind in Michigan to put in place a plan that recognizes the fundamental role child care holds in a family’s ability to work and become self-sufficient. Focused in the counties of Southeast Michigan, its tradition dates back more than 30 years.

Funded by the United Way, local and county governments, foundations, corporate sponsors and private donors, the program has helped over 5,800 low-income families like Harmon’s with the cost of early care and education for their children. This year alone it awarded $560,000 in scholarship for 446 children (from 287 families) within five of the seven counties it serves. The counties included Monroe, Jackson, Washtenaw, Hillsdale and Lenawee.

“When you’re talking about child care, it can be the third most expensive thing for a family behind rent and food,” said Pam Smith, executive director of the Great Start Regional Child Care Resource Center for Southeast Michigan.

“It’s a pivotal role in any family, providing stability for parents to go to work and go back to school, and it provides a stable environment for children to flourish in.”

The Family Support Program started with a small grant from the city of Ann Arbor after the Child Care Network partnered in Washtenaw County’s Blueprint to End Homelessness. It was a key link in a consortium battling against homelessness and domestic violence.

Lori Bush, the director of the Family Support Program today, said the initiative, which focused on getting families housed and “back on their feet,” quickly realized that for many the cost of quality child care was a major impediment for doing just that.

Child care costs for an infant in center-based care in Ann Arbor last year averaged $14,040, and $10,647 for a preschooler, said Bush. Take a single working parent making $14 an hour, and that cost represents 85 percent of the family’s gross earnings. The kicker: The modest income base disqualifies a family from state DHS childcare subsidies because they exceed their income guidelines.

“You just can’t do it,” Bush said. “You’re working to just pay child care at that point.

“Families are struggling to stay in their homes, to keep their jobs and put food on the table. Without assistance, this parent may be forced to make the difficult choice of placing their children in low-quality, unlicensed, unstable and potentially dangerous child care.”

The economics of child care

Smith and Bush frame the child care debate in economic terms. Without quality care, families can’t work and be productive members of society, hence their center’s motto, “We Help Families Work.”

The Family Support Program helps a wide range of families including dual-income professionals, single moms and dads who do not receive adequate or any child-care support, low-wage working parents and grandparents raising their grandchildren.

The Ann Arbor center, started 32 years ago, services six counties, including Hillsdale, Jackson, Lenawee, Livingston, Monroe and Washtenaw. Its Family Support Program is unique, but as a Great Start Regional Child Care Resource Center, it also offers child care resource and referral services and provider professional development that are an important part in strengthening Michigan’s quality child care system.

The district ranges from worldly and cosmopolitan Ann Arbor to extreme rural and farming communities of poverty and low-income.

“Unfortunately, we have some of the most hard-pressed counties in the state. We have a migrant population and a large Arabic population; it’s quite diverse,” Smith said.

Education and training are hallmarks of the operation. Each year, its 11-member staff racks up 10,000 hours of training for child care providers in the counties. They host a regional early childhood conference annually for teachers, parents, child care staff and anyone interested in early childhood education issues. The center offers an extensive onsite resource library for no cost to the community.

The new state mandate that has led to basic health and safety courses for hundreds of family and aide providers in the region has been a huge job but one that “bears quite a bit of fruit,” Smith said.

“It’s really highlighted how much the training was needed, how much they appreciate the training, how much they enjoyed learning about early childhood education, and how much they’ve appreciated the networking,” Smith said.

“We’ve very much appreciated our Great Start Collaboratives,” Smith added. “They’ve been critical points in our success in helping us connect with each community. And we’re making a significant difference in the actual knowledge of the providers who care for children. It’s important to know first aid, CPR. It recognizes how important raising a child is.”

About Pam Smith

From working for a Fortune 500 company in Colorado to promoting science fun at the Ann Arbor Hands-On Museum, Pam Smith’s career trajectory has been colorful and child-centric.

Today, Smith oversees 11 staff members and over a dozen subcontractors at Ann Arbor’s Child Care Network, one of Michigan’s Great Start Regional Child Care Resource Centers.

Before joining the nonprofit, though, Smith was the marketing and public affairs director for the Ann Arbor Hands-On Museum. Among other tasks: She worked on preschool initiatives, including development of a preschool gallery at the museum.

“During most of my adult life, I have been working with children on some level. Early childhood education is a great place to plant the seed (for learning). Let them know how exciting it is to learn new things,” Smith said.

Years ago, job transfers for Smith and her husband brought her to Michigan from Colorado. There she worked for a nationally recognized operator of child care centers. Smith ran 11 centers for the business – at the time a Fortune 500 company - and was responsible for 250 employees working with 2,500 families.

Today, as a strong proponent of the Great Start Child Care Quality Program in the populated areas in and around Ann Arbor, Smith is excited to be part of the state’s drive to improve child care quality.

“The program in the state of Michigan is a real change agent for early childhood education. And I’m really happy to be part of that difference. I truly believe we’re making a difference one child at a time.”