If Nick and Betsy Zandstra needed confirmation that they’d made the right choice when they started sending their daughter, Claire, to Meri Carpenter-Saladino’s home-based preschool in Bradford, Vt., it came in the form of dirty laundry.
“We’d show up and get handed a pile of completely mud-encrusted clothes,” said Zandstra, a self-employed sawyer and carpenter from Topsham, Vt. “We were really happy about that. … The kids got to go outdoors every single day, year-round. That was a really important thing to us and a really great thing for our kids.”
Not only does Carpenter-Saladino take the children in her charge outside every single day, year-round, she’s been doing it for 32 years.
Last month, the Burlington-based nonprofit Let’s Grow Kids honored Carpenter-Saladino for all those years of zipping up jackets, keeping track of mittens and helping children get a healthy start in life by awarding her its Early Educator of the Year Award. The award, which came with a $5,000 check, a trip to the Vermont Association for the Education of Young Children annual conference at Mount Snow and an additional $500 for her preschool, puts the spotlight on educators working in an often undervalued and underpaid profession.
“We have really, really skilled and qualified people doing this work, and it’s still a field that often doesn’t receive the respect and recognition it deserves,” said Sharron Harrington, Let’s Grow Kids’ senior programs manager for southern Vermont.
Carpenter-Saladino’s enduring commitment to children and her continued growth as an educator stood out to the award selection committee, Harrington said. “She’s had a profound impact on hundreds of kids in her community,” she said.
Having such an influence wasn’t something Carpenter-Saladino planned on. Working in the business office at the Aloha Foundation in Fairlee while expecting her second son, she was unable to line up child care for him so she could go back to work. She decided to operate her own child care program, just until her kids were in school. A week after her son was born, she opened My Second Home in a section of her small ranch-style house, and almost immediately she had six children enrolled.
Right away, she found that the work suited her. “It’s pretty amazing what they come up with. Their ideas and their thought process keep you going,” said Carpenter-Saladino, sitting on a child-size chair in an office stuffed with games, books and toys last Wednesday afternoon. “You have to look at each child as an individual and just take their needs into consideration … and just celebrate who they are.”
There were always more children to celebrate. As Carpenter-Saladino witnessed firsthand the effects of Vermont’s child care shortage, she slowly increased her enrollment and hired staff. She now has an enrollment of 18 and a daily attendance of 12, ranging in age from 18 months to 5 years, and one full-time and one part-time staff member.
Over time, she also solidified her place in the profession, earning her associate’s degree, then her bachelor’s degree and teaching license. Her program became a licensed preschool — one of just 23 home-based programs to earn that distinction so far — gained accreditation by the National Association for Family Child Care, became a Head Start collaborative and was the third home-based child care program to be recognized in the state’s STAR system.
“I don’t want to settle for mediocre. I want to have the best program I can have,” she said.
Over the years, Carpenter-Saladino has seen the state initiate a growing number of its own measures to weed out mediocrity, a trend she supports but also worries about.
“They’ve thrown so much at us in the last few years. It’s a lot to digest,” she said. “Good providers are getting out of the business.”
The growing list of regulations and piles of paperwork have not stopped Carpenter-Saladino from doing the work she likes and values most: playing with the kids. “Everything can be done through play-based learning,” she said.
Outdoor play, especially, is essential, Carpenter-Saladino said. When the weather’s nice, the kids spend more than half the day in a spacious yard. Even in the worst weather, they get outside as much as possible, although that sometimes means spending more time bundling up than actually playing outside, she said.
While Carpenter-Saladino chatted, about a dozen children napped in tiny cots placed along the edges of the adjoining rooms. Around 3 p.m., they began to wake up and gather one by one at a low table, where Carpenter-Saladino and her staff passed out saltines with sunflower seed butter and orange wedges, gently reminding the sleep-disheveled children to say “please” and “thank you.” Then Carpenter-Saladino sat down at the table with them and made small talk.
Afterward, the children wandered off to play with trucks, toy instruments, blocks and books. Except for a few tell-tale signs, the scene could have come out of another era: Virtually nothing beeped or buzzed, and most of the toys were made of wood.
Carpenter-Saladino joined a musical group, plinking on a toy piano and singing with 3-year-old Bailey Pippin while she played guitar. When another child ordered Bailey to give her the guitar, Carpenter-Saladino rephrased the statement.
“Why don’t you ask her if she’s finished with it?” she suggested.
That calm, cooperative tone is one of the things Zandstra appreciated about Carpenter-Saladino when his children were attending her preschool. “She’s got this great kind of Mister Rogers personality,” said Zandstra, who nominated Carpenter-Saladino for the award. “Every kid knows they are cared for by her … and nothing seems to faze her.”
Zandstra also loved the way Carpenter-Saladino made use of her small space, filling every nook with toys and activities meant to light up young minds.
Home-based programs like these offer a lot of benefits to families, said Harrington, whose own children attended home-based child care programs.
“We’re such a rural state. There are many families in remote parts of the state that really rely on home-based centers,” she said.
A lot of parents appreciate the mixed-age atmosphere of a typical home-based program, and they like that, in many cases, their kids can stay in the same program from birth to kindergarten or first grade as well as attend after school, Harrington said.
“It leads to a really deeply personal relationship between the family and the caregiver,” she said.
But for the providers who run the state’s 500 home-based programs, the work can be challenging. The vast majority of home-based providers are registered but not licensed, meaning they can care for only six children under the age of 6. These small ventures are often carved out of the providers’ own living quarters. And since they don’t generally employ additional staff, they often feel isolated, Harrington said.
Nor are they compensated well. Child care workers in Vermont earn an average of $29,000 per year, and preschool teachers earn an average of $34,000, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ May 2018 State Occupational Employment and Wage Estimates.
Not surprisingly, the turnover rate is high, and the number of home-based child care programs is on the decline, Harrington said.
Carpenter-Saladino feels the sting of such realities. “We’ve come so far … (but) many of us are still considered babysitters,” she said. “These are the nation’s most valuable assets. If we don’t put money into the education system, we’ll put it into the judicial system.”
Nevertheless, she’s hanging in there for at least a few more years. “I didn’t choose this. It chose me,” she said. “I thought I would just be in it five years … but there were always more families with more kids. There were always brothers and sisters coming along. There’s always been one more child to get into kindergarten. I couldn’t leave.”
Sarah Earle can be reached at searle@vnews.com or 603-727-3268.