49
or the past six years, Brittany
Schultz has been a kindergarten teacher
in the Denver public school system. On
May 28, she left, and on June 15, she
opened Ms. Brittany’s Village day care
in her home in Commerce City, Colo., with her three
children and one from another family. Within two
months of opening, she was, she says, making the
same money as she had made in a classroom but was
responsible for only nine kids. She and her husband,
who works with her, currently earn about $5,000 a
month.
Schultz is a peppy, can-do woman with the inde-
fatigable good cheer and focus that are key to work-
ing with little kids. But even for the very energetic, to
go from zero to opening a childcare center in a mat-
ter of weeks is remarkable. The licensing procedures
and safety requirements are significant, and can re-
quire home renovations. Opening your own business
in the teeth of a pandemic shutdown takes some guts.
And many teachers, especially those with graduate
degrees like Schultz, have historically shunned a
change of profession to what many see as babysit-
ting. Home-based centers are often regarded as the
The rise of
the ‘carebnb’
BY BELINDA LUSCOMBE
used-car yards of the U.S. childcare ecosystem: the
place people go when they can’t afford anywhere else,
which may be why the number of fully licensed op-
erations has more than halved in the past 15 years,
from 200,000 to 86,000.
One of the reasons Schultz was able to move so
swiftly was that she had joined a childcare franchise
known as MyVillage, a Colorado startup that matches
parents with caregivers, eHarmony-style, and takes
care of a lot of the administrative work, like billing
and insurance. MyVillage is one of a growing num-
ber of companies—usually with reassuring names
like Wonderschool, WeeCare or NeighborSchools—
that are trying to use technology to transform the
day-care industry by creating more home-based care
centers, and improving the reputation and profitabil-
ity of the ones that already exist. Childcare veterans
warn that they have a steep climb ahead of them.
About 7 million children under the age of 5
are cared for in someone’s home, according to the
2016 National Survey of Early Care and Education.
About 4 million of them are looked after by a rela-
tive. The other 3 million are in a home day care. De-
spite the number of children they care for, however,
these home-based day-care centers have often been
overlooked —by policymakers and legislators, parents
and nonprofits—since more than 90% of them are not
regulated, and it’s difficult to get a clear idea of the
standard of care. Expanding and improving the sector
was one of the centerpieces of the childcare-reform
initiative that Ivanka Trump shepherded through the^
Brittany
Schultz set up
a childcare
center in her
home in June;
she’s making
more money
than she did as
a teacher