Connecticut Launches Innovative Child Care Model to Address Shortages and Empower Entrepreneurs

This month Connecticut will be the first state to pilot a new business model for child care centers in seven communities. Under a 2021 law, the state can issue licenses for family child care businesses at non residential properties. It’s a hybrid of sorts that will give people who want to become child care providers, but don’t have the ability to start them in their homes, to get licensed to offer them at a one location in New Britain, New Haven, Bridgeport, Stamford, Hartford, Danbury, and Waterbury.

Tracey Madden Hennessey, executive director of the YWCA in New Britain, said these are women who want to open a daycare in their home, but can’t because they rent or because they simply don’t have access to capital. Madden Hennessey said they found housing authority space for four new female entrepreneurs who can take up to 32 children.

The new pilot allowed the YWCA to apply for funding to secure the space and help the women start their businesses. With access to fully equipped and furnished space at a low rent the new incubator program, which expires in 2026, is taking the facilities cost out of the equation for the new business owners.

The women also received training and will have each other to talk through their problems with. “Being a home daycare provider can be isolating,” Madden Hennessey said. The timing couldn’t be better. There are 100 children on a waiting list for an infant or toddler spot in New Britain alone. Coupled with the fact that Connecticut passed a law changing the age of eligibility for new kindergarteners from five years old by Dec.

31 of the school year to Sept. 1 means around 9,000 children will have to delay their start of school from 2024 to 2025. Madden Hennessey said it will likely mean that children are staying in child care longer and possibly preventing infants and toddlers who also need those spots from getting them. Courtney Parkerson, the Connecticut Project’s director for early childhood education, said statewide this change in kindergarten entry is putting a crunch on the shortage of childcare slots that existed before that change.

The Connecticut Project will be advocating at the state legislature for an extension of the timeframe to 2030 for the pilot program. They also want the legislature to allow more towns to participate and allow more locations within the communities where child care deserts exist. When the legislature passed the legislation allowing for the incubator spaces it didn’t come with any financial resources either so the program has been helped by the Women’s Business Development Council and other funding sources.

“We need to do more to invest early childhood education,” Parkerson said. The industry is facing not only a staffing crisis but a workforce shortage..