At a forum in Pine Plains on Wednesday evening, parents were asked what the ideal child care landscape in the area would look like if they could wave a “magic wand.”
They said they wanted care close to home, prices families could afford while still paying providers a living wage, shared transportation, no waitlists, and more choices among providers, including Spanish-speaking options. They also wanted outdoor learning and limited or no screen time. More than anything, they wanted certainty.
For now, their wish list remains just that. There is no magic wand.
Families across northern Dutchess continue to piece together care through grandparents, friends, neighbors, informal providers, long drives, and work schedules shaped around whoever can watch a child. Employers, meanwhile, described workers cutting hours, rearranging shifts, and missing work when those arrangements break down.
The conversations were part of an Aug. 19 forum at the Pine Plains Free Library organized by Dutchess County Legislator Chris Drago (D-19) and the Child Care Council of Dutchess and Putnam. About 30 parents, employers, providers, community leaders, and elected officials attended as Dutchess County prepares for a state-backed expansion of child care.
Dutchess is one of three counties, along with Broome and Monroe, selected for a pilot intended to test new approaches to providing affordable child care for infants and toddlers. The enacted state budget includes $66 million for the three pilots. Under the state’s plan, Dutchess is to receive $20 million and contribute a $2 million match.
The program is focused on children from birth through age 3 and is intended to support as many as 1,000 child care seats in each county. The state has said the first seats are expected to come online in 2027, with the pilots designed around affordable, full-day, year-round care.
For participants Wednesday, the question was not simply how many seats could be created, but whether rural northeastern Dutchess has enough existing or prospective providers to benefit from the expansion.
Drago said the forum grew out of earlier conversations among parents and providers and was intended to put families, businesses, and elected officials in the same room.
“This is a hugely important conversation for our community,” Drago said. “It is becoming harder and harder to live and work and raise a family in Northeast Dutchess.”
For the roughly 375 students attending Cold Spring Early Learning Center and Seymour Smith Intermediate Learning Center, there are just two registered family day cares within the Pine Plains Central School District, along with the district’s pre-K program at Cold Spring.
The two registered family day cares are overseen by the state Office of Children and Family Services. Each can enroll no more than eight children at any given time and must have at least one caregiver for every two children younger than 2.
One is operated by Wendy Bandy, 58, who has run a family day care from her Elizaville home for about 23 years. Most of the children she cares for attend the Pine Plains school district, she said.
Openings are rare.
“I do keep [a waitlist,]” Bandy said. “Usually, because it is so infrequently that I have an opening, by the time I call the person on the top, they have found somebody and they want to keep their child with that person because they’re comfortable with them.”
Bandy said she prefers operating as a registered provider because of the safety standards. Registered day care operators must be certified in CPR and first aid. Every two years, Bandy said, she must also complete 30 hours of training on topics including safety and security procedures, identifying child abuse, and developing children’s social and emotional skills.
“They come in every quarter unannounced, which is actually a good thing,” Bandy said. “They check that all of my logs are correct, that I’m doing all of the evacuation procedures and the shelter-in-place procedures that I’m supposed to, with the kids. That’ll have to be documented.”
Running a day care from home can also require substantial sacrifices from a provider’s own family.
“It takes a lot,” Bandy said. “My kids gave up a lot in school. They couldn’t do after school activities where they had to be picked up because I couldn’t do it. I didn’t get out in time, and my husband works so he couldn’t do it. So it was a big sacrifice for my whole family but in the long run, it’s been a very successful business.”
Then there is the cost to parents.
Bandy charges $165 for five days of care, including meals and snacks. The average weekly cost at a family day care in Dutchess County is about $250 for children from 6 weeks to 5 years old, according to the Child Care Council.
Alissa Cleveland of Ancramdale sends her 3-year-old daughter to Guardian Angel daycare in Millbrook, close to the elementary school where Cleveland works as a teacher. The arrangement had been convenient, but Cleveland said the owner planned to close the day care before moving to Florida.
Cleveland and her husband were also expecting another baby in August and hoped to send both children to the same provider. Long waitlists and high prices made that uncertain.
It took the couple about two months to narrow their options, Cleveland said. Some charged as much as $700 a week for two children.
They considered splitting their daughters’ time between an informal home day care in Pine Plains and another facility in Pleasant Valley.
“We’re still figuring things out but I think the plan is to have them do part time between the two places,” Cleveland said. “And honestly, another reason for that is just to help with the cost also.”
Cold Spring has offered pre-K since 2015, according to Principal Kristen Fischetti. The program runs from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. on weekdays. It had 53 students during the 2025 school year and about 44 enrolled for the coming year.
The program has helped parents connect with one another for carpools and assistance with pickups and drop-offs, Fischetti said. But a six-hour school day does not cover the workday for many parents.
Fischetti experiences that herself, relying on a combination of the school bus, friends, and her retired parents to help care for her two children around the school day.
“Up in northern Dutchess County and southern Columbia, it’s really a daycare desert, to be honest,” Fischetti said. “I know that enrollment is declining but we do have quite a population of younger children. And so I think that daycare really becomes necessary when you have two working parents in an area where there’s not much up here.”
Sarah Hobokian, owner of Heaven’s Light bakery on Pilch Drive, said she is still planning to open a registered day care on the property. The project received Planning Board approval in December 2023 but never opened.
Hobokian said she has not set a timeline for opening it.
The shortage might suggest an obvious solution: open more day cares.
Providers and community organizations at Wednesday’s forum described why that has proved difficult.
Irene Banning, chair of the North East Community Center, spoke from the experience of an organization whose Early Learning Program closed last year after struggling to make center-based child care financially sustainable.
“I think that just at the outset, let’s make it clear that child care is about economic development,” Banning said. “You can’t have a workforce without it.”
Banning said a center-based program depends on enrolling enough children to cover staffing and other operating costs. NECC put unrestricted money into its program, she said, but eventually had to weigh continuing it against the organization’s other work.
“It’s a tough business for a center-based approach,” she said.
Banning also pointed to people caring for children in their homes without being registered or certified. Collecting data to understand how much informal care exists in the area, why those providers remain outside the formal system, and what it would cost for them to become registered could be important to expanding capacity, she said.
Participants discussed hurdles facing prospective home-based providers, including training, insurance, staffing ratios, and the cost of bringing a property into compliance before a new business begins producing income.
Jordan Schmidt described what that shortage looks like from the perspective of both a parent and a small business.
Schmidt runs Chaseholm Farm with her wife Sarah Chase, where she said child care has complicated efforts by employees, particularly women, to return to work after having children.
“There really isn’t anything in a, you know, 20 minute radius besides small home providers,” Schmidt said.
She said families had spent more than a year on waitlists while trying to find care that fit their commutes and work schedules.
The result has been constant adjustment at the farm.
“It means that we’re working out lots of alternative schedules with our staff, you know, going down from a full work week to a couple of days a week to half days,” Schmidt said.
At one point, a child care problem nearly forced the farm to cancel a delivery route, she said, which would have affected sales. The instability also makes it difficult to retain employees, build a team, and plan for future growth, she said.
Other participants described employees leaving early when children became sick, couples arranging opposite shifts so one parent could remain home, and a preferred candidate for a full-time job who could not accept the position because she lacked child care.
Geography compounds the problem. An opening at a provider miles from a family’s home, school, or workplace may not be a practical opening at all.
Participants discussed whether existing schools, churches, and other community buildings could be used for child care, along with partnerships among businesses, nonprofits, schools, and government. Insurance, staffing, transportation, and regulatory costs remain obstacles.
The state-backed expansion offers Dutchess County an opportunity to address some of those shortages, but participants said rural communities pose challenges that funding alone may not solve.
They discussed helping home-based caregivers become registered, supporting existing programs that could expand, improving transportation, and using buildings that are already in place.
Assemblymember Didi Barrett (D-106) said the conversation raised a broader question for her about why public responsibility for education generally begins only after a child reaches school age.
“If we truly believe in public education, we arbitrarily decide that it starts at five, or it starts at four, three,” Barrett said. “Why are we not starting at the very beginning?”
State Sen. Michelle Hinchey (D-41) said the fragmented nature of child care is one reason efforts to create a universal system have taken time, particularly in rural areas where providers are scattered and communities have developed different arrangements to fill gaps.
“There’s a really unique opportunity for us and Dutchess to get it right,” Hinchey said, “and to be a model for the rest of the state. That’s the opportunity that we have at hand, which is what’s really exciting, but also really daunting because it’s hard to be the first people to try to figure that out.”
U.S. Rep. Pat Ryan (D-NY-18), whose office was represented at the forum, said in a statement that he supported the state pilot and would continue advocating for federal funding to expand affordable and accessible child care in the Hudson Valley.
“All across the Hudson Valley, parents are working tirelessly to provide for their families, put food on the table, and ensure their children have everything they need to thrive. That’s even more difficult in child care deserts like Northern Dutchess and Pine Plains,” said Rep. Ryan. “I’m proud of the progress that New York has made – especially the Governor’s plan for universal child care and pilot program bringing $20 million to Dutchess County to expand access and capacity. I’ll also keep fighting at the federal level against any further attempts to cut child care funding, and will always advocate to expand federal funding opportunities for the Hudson Valley.”
For the parents gathered in the library, the need for policies and investments to expand access to child care was immediate. They had already described what a reliable child care system would look like: care they could afford, close enough to use, available when they needed it, with reliable transportation and providers who could afford to do the work.
The magic-wand exercise took only a few minutes. Building the child care system on their wish list will be considerably harder.
I don’t see why a committee couldn’t be formed with the HINCHEY & RYAN Team to resolve this issue. There are plenty of places that might be willing to do it if you remove some of the restrictions. Also, what about children that are older but parent can not pick them up from school, child should not be left alone. Were any of you going home from school, even by bus, get dropped off and face an empty house every day?
Just to note – remember the above named represent a political party that wants your votes. you will be paying in some way if “Socialists” take over. Try to find a way to live more simply on one persons salary. Don’t take on more debt than you can afford. Have one person stay home – don’t care which one – to be the so – called “home maker” for that is what that person is. Watch what is done about this issue in the near future (even started). Latch key kids are not the way to go.