Chris Nelson teaches preschool in rural Vermont, just a few miles from the Canadian border, but not in the school or child care center most people think of when they imagine state or locally funded pre-K. Instead, her 3- and 4-year-old students are integrated into her five-star-rated rural home-based child care program, where she also cares for younger children and a few kids who come after school until their working parents pick them up.

Many of those parents would have to drive more than an hour to reach a center- or school-based pre-K program where the state covers tuition for just 10 hours a week. In contrast, Nelson’s program is open 12 hours a day to cover parents’ commutes, the nontraditional hours of shift workers and those who do seasonal work.

Nelson would like to continue teaching pre-K, and parents of those children would like to receive the state’s $3,800 free tuition for enrolling in Nelson’s program. However, new recommendations from Vermont’s School Board Insurance Trust (VSBIT), which insures schools and preschool programs, effectively exclude home-based providers from participation, because the $2 million insurance policy they recommend (based on school district needs) isn’t even available to home-based child care providers, sometimes also called family child care providers or FCCs.

Nelson brought the problem to the attention of state child care regulators. In a memo released in mid-June to school district superintendents, Vermont Agencies of Education and Human Services indicate that local departments of education can waive the insurance requirement for home-based pre-K programs that are unable or cannot afford to secure the policy recommended by VSBIT.

Because this policy change has come so late, just two months before the 2024 school year begins, when most districts have already made decisions about partnerships with private pre-K providers, it remains to be seen how many rural home-based child care providers will be able to offer pre-K this year.

Vermont, like many states, is committed to a mixed-delivery model for pre-K education, allowing the state’s pre-K tuition subsidy to be applied for programs in a variety of existing settings, including those based in homes. Nevertheless, according to the National Institute for Early Education Research (NIEER) State of Preschool 2023 Yearbook, in 2022-2023, more than 60 percent of pre-K children served were in public school settings, not private programs or home-based child care options.

Read the full article about rural home-based child care by Anne Vilen at The Daily Yonder.