Mixed reviews for child care assistance
As area companies look for ways to attract and retain qualified employees in an increasingly competitive market place, their track record on one family-critical benefit is getting mixed reviews — corporate-sponsored child care.
Helping workers find care for their children was a popular HR focus more than a decade ago and some companies in Central Mass., such as Webster-based Commerce Insurance Co. and UMass Memorial Health Care, were pioneers in the effort. Commerce began its in-house day care program 20 years ago and continues to offer company-supplemented care for up to 140 children of its 2000-member workforce. The program, according to Leanne Shea, manager of employee relations and child care administration, has grown steadily, remains extremely popular and is a good tool to attract and keep workers.But Shea admits operating an in-house day care center, for which Commerce pays 55 staffers and for which it built a separate building eight years ago, is no easy task. And Joanne Gravell, program director for Childcare Connection, a state-contracted nonprofit childcare resource locator in the Greater Worcester Area that also provides training, says the region’s companies are reluctant to take on the expense and liability of centers.
On the other hand, Ilene Serpa, vice president of communications at Watertown-based Bright Horizons Family Solutions, which operates some 600 child-care centers for corporations worldwide, presents a much brighter picture.
Her $625-million-a-year company sees a 15 to 20 percent growth each year as more companies see the value in sponsoring child-care centers.
Serpa says she is seeing more interest in child-care programs by health care entities, law offices, colleges and universities. In health care, it’s a tool to help recruit and retain nurses. In academia, it’s a way to help close the gender gap on tenured professors.
Bright Horizons also recently unveiled a new program that provides an option to smaller employers who can’t offer full day care, according to Serpa. Called Back-up Advantage, it allows companies to provide temporary child care to workers when their regular child care service is unavailable. Bright Horizons has opened 70 centers that do just back-up child care.
Locally, Bright Horizons operates child-care centers for Framingham-based Staples Inc. and Hopkinton-based EMC Corp. At EMC, Anne Docimo, benefits analyst, deems the company’s five-year-old center a clear success. The program has 84 children enrolled and 23 on a waiting list. EMC also offers a summer camp program for employees’ children and pays 15 to 20 percent of costs per child enrolled.
Despite admirable programs like EMC’s, Gravell says the region is doing a "poor job" of helping families with child care. "We haven’t come up with any new solutions," she says. What she would like to see is a "conversation" between employers, local officials and service agencies about what the child-care needs are in our area and how best to address them.
Micky Baca can be reached at mbaca@wbjournal.com
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