Closing of child care center upsets parents

Groton - A meeting over the fate of a child care center at Groton's Fairview, an elder care facility run by the Odd Fellows Home of Connecticut, was rife with emotion Thursday evening, with distraught parents questioning the site's top administrator, who told them Monday the center would be closing because it was losing money.

Jim Malloy, the administrator of the not-for-profit facility, said that Friends Learning Together, a child care center with about 40 students and 11 employees, was on pace to drain the Odd Fellows of $177,000 this year. With revenues from Medicare and Medicaid frozen and expenses skyrocketing (health insurance costs just spiked 40 percent), the facility could no longer afford to "eat the loss" for the center, which has lost about $1.5 million in the 10 years it has been open, Malloy said.

"I don't understand how it got to this point before parents were told the center was this much in the red," said Dawn Mingione, whose 4-year-old daughter is enrolled at the center. "Why all of a sudden is this so urgent?"

Parents, about two dozen of whom attended Thursday night's meeting, said they knew Friends Learning Together's finances were tight: it had recently eliminated the daily snack it provides at a savings of about $10,000 a year, and cut a teaching position. But they said they had no indication that the center's prognosis was so grim.

"We obviously wanted this meeting months ago, years ago," said Karin Mahoney, a nurse at Fairview whose 4-year-old twin boys are enrolled in the center. "We have a parent-teacher committee you could have come to. You didn't."

The center is set to close in less than 30 days, the minimum amount of time required by the state to take such action. Parents pleaded for the center to remain open until the start of the summer, when more child care options are available, but Malloy said the Board of Directors would only allow a grace period of two extra weeks.

Determined to make a difference, parents say they plan to write letters to every member of Odd Fellows' board of directors asking them to convene an emergency meeting ahead of their next quarterly meeting, which is scheduled to be held in June.

If they cannot stop the imminent closure, they want to at least delay it long enough to find new arrangements for their children. That will be no easy task, they say: They consider Fairview's child care center to be the best in the region.

"There's no places comparable," said Mingione, who had organized the meeting. "We're here because of the services you provide."

"And that's not affordable any more," Malloy answered back. "Not in this climate. It is what it is. The [government reimbursement] rates are awful. I won't see a rate increase and Obamacare is only going to make it worse. I wish I was retired, I wish I didn't have to make this decision. But this is the state we're in."

m.collette@theday.com