Vermont’s widely acknowledged, ongoing childcare crisis continues to create challenges for Middlebury College faculty and staff with young children, who are not guaranteed childcare spots. Two recent developments in childcare projects in Middlebury will offer partial alleviation of the issue, reflecting the college and community’s efforts to improve local childcare capacity.
Red Clover Children’s Center, located within The Congregational Church of Middlebury, opened on Jan. 15.
Otter Creek Childcare Center received a permit from the Town of Middlebury in December to begin construction on their Community Child Care Expansion Project this spring following years of planning, which it anticipates will open in the fall of 2025. The college-subsidized project will combine Otter Creek with College Street Children’s Center, more than doubling the two facilities’ existing capacities separately.
The nonprofit childcare advocacy organization Let’s Grow Kids reported in 2022 that 471 infants and 240 toddlers (ages 1–3 years old) in Addison County are likely to need childcare. However, available capacity at the time of the report allowed for only 148 infants and 111 toddlers to receive care.
Red Clover will add six spots for infants and 18 spots for toddlers, while Otter Creek estimates adding 20 spots for children under two years old, approximately 10 spots for two-year-olds and between 33 and 47 spots for preschoolers.
Tessa Dearborn, Red Clover’s founding director, said that planning for the Red Clover Center began about two years ago, when church leaders thought about the child care crisis and how the Congregational Church’s three classrooms went unused six days of the week. A group of volunteer board members worked to transform the space to house a non-profit that would help fill the gaps in high-quality, reliable childcare for working families in their community.
“The process ebbed and flowed through hopeful and terrifying in the sense of the costs and all of the things that would go into making this happen,” Dearborn told The Campus.
The issue of initial seed cost was resolved by a $200,000 donation from local nonprofit Table 21 and a $360,000 donation from an anonymous donor, according to the Addison Independent. Vermont’s 2023 Child Care Bill — which will invest $125 million into Vermont’s child care system annually going forward — also promised significant financial security for the establishment of Red Clover and will qualify some families for tuition subsidies, according to Dearborn.
Having worked in early childhood education for more than a decade, Dearborn was hired by the Church’s Board of Directors in late September as Red Clover’s founding director. Striving to create a fair and equitable enrollment and waitlist system for the center, Dearborn landed on a lottery system that ensures inclusion and representation of all ages and gender identities in their classrooms.
Red Clover initially aimed to hire three teachers and open one classroom, but they have since exceeded that goal, hiring seven teachers to staff three classrooms.
“We are genuinely surprised,” Dearborn said. “The fact that we’re able to open all of the classrooms essentially at the same time is pretty astounding and not at all expected.”
Red Clover began gradually by opening one classroom on Jan. 15 for a half day, which allowed children to transition to the school and families to meet teachers before the kids’ first full day on Jan. 17. While the second classroom will open on Jan. 29, the infant classroom start date is yet to be determined.
Meanwhile, the Otter Creek Center is awaiting the physical copy of their granted construction permit and an environmental-impact review from the State of Vermont, both of which are expected to be received in February before they can take their next steps, according to Linda January, executive director at the center.
When the project is completed, the carriage barn that is attached to the current building — an old farmhouse at 150 Weybridge Street — will be removed and replaced with a 13,000 square foot addition. The expanded building will allow space for 13 total classrooms, a commercial kitchen, dedicated office space, three playgrounds and a large parking lot by a new main entrance, which will allow for safer entrance and exit of the building, according to January.
Removal of the barn and preloading of the site will happen over the summer and further construction will begin in the fall. January estimated that the construction will take about a year to complete.
The expanded center will add approximately 25 jobs, which January acknowledged may be challenging to fill.
“Staffing is always an issue and since Covid has been exacerbated a bit,” she said. “As much as we would like to be at full capacity and fully operating the day the new facility opens, we know that that’s probably not realistic, and so we will open spaces as we’re able to hire the staff to do so with the main focus being in our infant-toddler classrooms.”
Middlebury College helped start Otter Creek in 1984 and the College Street Children’s Center in 2001 after it created the Middlebury Early Care and Education Consortium in 2000, an agreement between the college, United Way of Addison County, Addison County Child Care Services, Bristol Family Center, Mary Johnson Children's Center and Otter Creek. Although this agreement expired in 2017, the college has continued to support these centers financially on an annual basis, according to Sue Ritter, director of community relations at the college.
“It’s important to note that the original consortium agreement was not intended to be a long-term solution, especially given the need for expansion,” Ritter wrote in an email to The Campus, citing Otter Creek’s expansion project as a more efficient solution to the childcare crisis than the now-expired agreement. The childcare crisis, in concurrence with the ongoing housing crisis, curbs the college’s ability to recruit and maintain college faculty and staff and has a similarly negative impact on local businesses.
In addition to grant funding, the college also donated the land adjacent to Otter Creek into which the facility will expand. It will also provide a temporary space on the college’s property for the childcare center to operate in during the construction period. This location is currently undetermined but will be finalized and announced in the coming months.
As a part of Otter Creek’s partnership with the college, 60% of its enrollment must be children of families with a parent working for the college. At Otter Creek, the Mary Johnson Children’s Center and Bristol Family Center, families with at least one parent working for the college are given priority on the waitlists — this does not guarantee them childcare, but increases their likelihood of being granted a spot. Each of these centers enroll at least two children whose parents work at the college, according to January.
Even with this advantage, Adi Livny, an Israel Institute Teaching Fellow at the college, still faced challenges in finding convenient childcare for her three-year-old son when they moved to Vermont two years ago. Warned in advance about the difficulties of finding childcare, Livny not only registered for a waitlist that could land her a spot at several childcare centers months in advance, but also called each of the local centers individually to inquire about their availability.
“Part of the problem is that you don’t know if you have a spot until late in the process and that if you’re new in town, you have less resources and connections in the community, and then it’s pretty complicated to get daycare,” Livny said.
For her first year working at Middlebury, Livny successfully secured a spot for her son at the Bristol Family Center, a 20-minute drive from her Middlebury faculty housing. After a year of driving her son this distance to Bristol for childcare every morning, she was offered spots at Mary Johnson and at the Bridge School, both centers located in Middlebury. She took the spot at Mary Johnson, which she believes she was given because her son had turned three, entering an age group with more care available than that for younger children.
“If you teach here at the college [faculty housing] is very convenient and is supposedly a very local lifestyle — you can walk to work, that’s the advantage of having faculty housing, but if you don’t have childcare in town, it changes these ideals of living in a college town,” Livny said.
Red Clover and Otter Creek’s upcoming development projects are an attempt to uphold those ideals, making childcare more accessible for Middlebury locals.
Madeleine Kaptein '25.5 (she/her) is a managing editor.
Madeleine previously served as a staff writer, copy editor and local editor. She is a Comparative Literature major with minors in German and Art History. In Spring 2024, she studied abroad in Mainz, Germany, from where she wrote for the Addison Independent about her host country. In her free time, she enjoys journaling, long walks and runs, and uncomplicated visual arts projects.
