Fighting for Kids

It wasn't Sweden, the ultimate welfare state. Nor was it France, where every child is in a public preschool from the age of 3. It was the U.S. military, which almost by stealth has come to operate one of the best child-care systems in the country, if not the world.

The Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines are the nation's largest employer-sponsored provider of day care,feeding, teaching, entertaining and changing the diapers of some 200,000 children in more than 300 locations all over the world. (Service members have preference, but civilians working at military bases are eligible for the child-care services.)

I heard about military child care in 1994, when I asked Cathy Modigliani, an authority on family-based care, what an ideal child-care system would look like. "Take a look at the military," she said. "They are the best."

The Carnegie Corp. echoed this judgment in a 1996 report on the importance of children's early years. In speech after speech, top staffers of the Children's Defense Fund, the pre-eminent advocates for poor children, have cited the superb system on military bases as a national model. And now the President and Mrs. Clinton, once a CDF board member, are saying that every family deserves the kind of child-care support the military provides its own.

One day this autumn I took a look at this vaunted system; specifically, at the Army's child-care programs at Fort Meade, Md., home to the headquarters of the First Army, a number of military intelligence units and the super-secret National Security Agency.

My first stop was Child Development Center II, one of two centers that look like state-of-the-art schools, each with a capacity for 150 children. Eighty percent are from families with both parents in the military.

Every age group has a section, filled with toys, books, learning materials and art supplies. In Room 8, reserved for infants, four babies were sleeping in large cribs. Valerie Griffin, the center director, pointed out that the cribs were on wheels, ready to be rolled out an exit in case of an emergency. Two toddlers were exploring the room, supervised by two women sitting on the floor.

Quality Care

"Our ratio is one caregiver for every four babies," Griffin said. "For pretoddlers, ages 1 to 2, the ratio is 1-to-5; for toddlers, the 2- to 3-year-olds, it is 1-to-7; and for preschoolers, ages 3 to 5, it is 1-to-10. We also have two curriculum specialists in the building who oversee classes and training."

Out of a staff of 78, she explained, 22 had completed a training course in child development, health and safety, leading to a nationally recognized credential. The rest of the staff, which included one male, were in the process of acquiring credentials, which usually takes 18 months to two years. Those who don't finish the course must leave.

"We get people looking at this as a profession,better-quality people," said Griffin.

We strolled past the toddlers. The room was a rainbow of multiracial kids, two up to their elbows in suds and water, washing tiny pots and pans, while nearby a tot in a smock was painting at an easel. We toured a large kitchen where two hot meals a day and snacks are prepared. The Agriculture Department inspects the kitchen regularly, and the center is subject to four unannounced inspections every year by different authorities. My guides also pointed out a prominently displayed 800 number for parents and staff to report any suspicions or concerns.

All visitors, including parents, have to sign in and out, wear badges and be accompanied while in the facility. Every door, including closets, has a long window providing a view of what is going on inside. Every employee is subject to a rigorous background investigation, including an FBI fingerprint check. At the front desk, a bank of television monitors shows every room in the building. "We tape the teachers and review the tapes for monitoring and for training," said Griffin.

Extraordinary security has been a feature of military child care since the DoD was badly burned by a series of child abuse cases in the late 1980s. The Oklahoma City bombing, which destroyed a federal day-care center and killed many children, only reinforced a sense that there is no such thing as too many precautions.

Pay and Benefits

I asked Griffin how much a member of her staff could expect to earn. She pulled out a salary chart, showing that low-level, untrained assistants start at $13,570 a year. An "educational technician," a classroom teacher/caregiver, ranks as a GS-4 in the civil service and can make between $18,600 and $24,300. Lead teachers are GS-5s, able to earn between $20,900 and roughly $27,000; curriculum specialists are GS-9s, at $31,680 to $41,185; and Griffin herself, as director, is a GS-11 earning a little more than $40,000. Everyone has full benefits.

This is stunning compared with the child-care world outside the gates of a military base. Even the most experienced private-sector teachers, with college degrees in child development, often earn no more than $15,000 to $18,000 a year, in dead-end positions lacking even medical benefits. Only 18 percent of civilian centers offer health coverage to their staffs.

The result is massive annual turnover, averaging one-third nationally and up to 40 percent in many centers, a level of disruption that guarantees poor care.

Annual turnover in military day care is also high. According to DoD, it is "under 40 percent" for all four services; for the Army it is somewhere in the 20 percent range. But turnover is high not because of low wages and poor working conditions, but because most caregivers in DoD facilities are military spouses subject to transfers.

Professional Mothers

I next paid a visit to three "family child-care" providers, women who work in their homes caring for up to six children. All of the military's almost 10,000 family child-care providers are women, married to soldiers. They are independent contractors, but they go through the same kind of training and are subject to the same oversight as day-care center workers.

Because of the cost of building new centers, and because many parents prefer to have their children in a home setting, future expansion of military child care is likely to come through signing up new family providers. They already care for half of the children in day care at Fort Meade. Nationwide, almost 20 percent of children in paid child care are with family providers.

I undoubtedly was introduced to "model mothers," but the system backing them up is a major reason their operations are so impressive. Their homes were small-town houses, with virtually the entire downstairs given over to toddlers, infants and their staggering array of equipment: toys, puzzles, books, artwork and decorations, not to mention strollers, cribs and sleeping mats.

Each provider had posted her weekly lunch menu and activity plan for parents to see. Mornings after breakfast might be devoted to arts and crafts, kitchen science projects and play in the nearby park. Then a time with toys while "Miss Elaine," one caregiver I visited, fixed a hot lunch. Then came nap time, followed by a snack and more physical activity: songs, games, outdoor play.

"My kid often doesn't want to leave," said a mother who arrived to pick up her 18-month-old.

Out of the Ghetto'

My principal guide at Fort Meade was M.A. Lucas, chief of child and youth services for the Army. The wife of a retired naval officer, she was the first person hired by the Army to professionalize its day-care system.

"You have to understand what it was like before," she said as we drove around the sprawling base. "In the 1970s, most military wives didn't work, and there were only volunteers watching kids on an hourly basis, while their mothers went to meetings or luncheons or volunteer activities. Gradually, more and more mothers started working, and what had worked for a few hours didn't work at all for all day."

Kids were being "baby-sat" in World War II-era Quonset huts, stables and empty prisons. In 1982 the General Accounting Office issued a report documenting unsafe or substandard conditions in 98 percent of facilities. Centers had peeling lead paint, makeshift kitchens with open flame stoves and second-story playrooms with no fire escapes. Child development expert Burton White called military child care a "ghetto" at a national conference in the early 1980s.

The services each appointed a civilian woman to head the effort to clean up their act. Over the next 10 years, more than 100 new centers were built and a protocol on child safety was developed by the Red Cross at DoD expense. Then a new bombshell burst. Serious and substantiated charges of child abuse at three bases led to congressional hearings in 1989. Once again the armed services were embarrassed and forced to make still more reforms.

By this time a second demographic factor had emerged to accelerate the process. Not only were more military wives working,almost two-thirds at last count, but more servicemen had wives. In the early 1950s, only 35 percent of the nation's military force was married. Today nearly 60 percent of all service people are married, and half of military families have at least one child below school age.

During the 1989 hearings, the Army revealed that 20 percent of its enlisted soldiers and 22 percent of officers lost job time over a three-month period due to child-care problems. "We spend a lot of Senate time and federal money on Pentagon issues like Star Wars and the B-2 bomber. But child care is a Pentagon issue too, and it is important to begin spending more time on that as well," said Sen. Ted Kennedy, D-Mass., who sponsored legislation giving the military the money to develop its state-of-the-art system.

The 1989 Military Child Care Act mandated quality, affordable child care, an oxymoron without public subsidies. And the military got the money to do it right. The program was not to be custodial, or baby-sitting; it was to be developmental, providing youngsters with the early education they need to thrive. The staff was to be paid as much as comparable staff on military installations, with opportunities for advancement linked to training. Family providers were subsidized through low- or no-cost insurance, lending libraries and direct cash payments to take in infants. And critically, parents' fees were to be kept low, so that the lower ranks could afford quality care. Families pay on a sliding scale based on income. The average weekly fee in a military center in 1996 was $65. In 1997, fees have ranged from $37 a week to $98 a week.

The military subsidies amount to half the cost of the care provided, or an average of $3,400 per year per child. The total appropriated budget for all child-care programs was $273 million for fiscal 1997.

Most American parents have to pay two to four times as much for inferior care. In the area around Fort Meade, private arrangements cost at least $200 a week. Capt. Pamela Pewitt, whose 18-month-old son is being cared for by family provider Elaine McCann, told me she had been offered a higher paying private-sector job, but after investigating the civilian child-care situation she decided to remain in the military.

"I'd be scared to take him off post," Pewitt said. "One center I visited had 10 infants, sitting on the floor, rocking, with runny noses. . . . There were three adults there but they didn't speak very good English and had nothing to say when I tried to ask questions. . . . My neighbor is pregnant right now and I can see the panic on her face. She doesn't know what she is going to do. She asked me, 'Do you know anyone? Can your provider take him?' I had to tell her you had to be in the military to have Elaine."

A Work Issue

It can be argued that military personnel, who are transferred on average every three years, often live far from relatives, and are subject to sudden deployments, have a special need for quality child care. "We view child care as a work issue," says Linda Smith, director of DoD's Office of Family Policy. "We do believe our program is a factor in readiness. If our people don't have reliable child care, they can't go to work."

"The military is about taking care of soldiers," explains Col. Rich Rutledge, a former infantryman who is deputy commander for operations in the Army's Community and Family Support Center. "Having a force ready to go to war is what's important, and this is as much a part of it as anything else."

The result, ironically, is a double standard of child care in the United States. More than 75 percent of DoD child-care programs have been independently accredited, versus 5 percent nationally. In contrast to the new and heavily inspected military centers, civilian centers resemble the "ghetto" the military once was. Children are warehoused in basements, empty offices, trailers, and yes, even warehouses. The vast majority of programs are not required to meet any particular educational or developmental standards.

"It is unfortunate," says Helen Blank, the Children's Defense Fund's director of child-care programs and policy, "that the best chance a family has to be guaranteed affordable and high-quality care in this country is to join the military."

Nevertheless, the military brass has a love-hate relationship with child care, insiders told me. One said, "After all, every dollar spent on day care is a dollar not spent on weapons."

Growing concerns about the cost of the program may be changing its shape. Some services are testing outsourcing in several locations,paying cash subsidies to outside family providers,to see if that reduces costs.

The military is also trying to be a national agent for change in child care, following an executive order President Clinton issued in April urging DoD to share its child-care expertise with civilian programs.

DoD is planning to make training materials available through the Internet. It is also working with a private nonprofit group that is developing a system of accreditation for family caregivers. Military child-care experts like Lucas and Smith are speaking all over the country, telling state administrators what they could copy without spending the money the military has at its disposal. "They might not be able to do as many inspections as we do, but they could do unannounced inspections," says Lucas. "They could do a hot line, and link wage increases to training."

At the child-care conference, President Clinton announced that in his next budget he would ask for a new scholarship program to improve child-care training, and propose legislation to create a national registry to make it easier to run background checks on caregivers. Child care will be an important feature of his State of the Union address to Congress next month, and according to a senior administration official, he will probably propose a three-part program:

• Minimum federal standards that states will be encouraged to adopt.
• An after-school program aimed at keeping teen-agers busy between the hours of 3 and 8 p.m., when fully half of youth crime is committed.
• Child-care subsidies for families with incomes in the $20,000 to $35,000 range.

In the end, the name of the game of quality, affordable child care is money. Lower-paid civilian federal workers, unlike lower-ranking soldiers, often can't even use the 225 child-care centers sponsored by civilian agencies because of the high fees. Both Congress and the White House have expressed concern, and in response, David J. Barram, head of the General Services Administration, which sponsors almost half of the federal centers, was blunt.

"The affordability problem can only be solved by an infusion of new money," he wrote in a recent letter to Franklin D. Raines, director of the Office of Management and Budget. It remains to be seen whether Congress and the President, not to mention the states and cities dealing with the children of welfare reform, will respond by putting their money where their mouth is.

Ann Crittenden, a former reporter for The New York Times, is writing a book on the value of the work of raising children. She is based in Washington.