WEST LEBANON — Last January, Twin River Children’s Center on Seminary Hill Road was on the brink of closure, and it is not out of the woods yet.
The child care center’s leaders are navigating a maze of challenges, primarily related to staffing and funding, Board Chairman Craig Babcock said at the center last week.
The nonprofit daycare opened in 1991 at the VA Medical Center in White River Junction and has been in West Lebanon since the mid-1990s. It currently serves infants and toddlers.
After losing and replacing the center’s entire staff, running things with board volunteers at the helm and working with the Lebanon-based nonprofit Early Care and Education Association, or ECEA, to navigate challenges and find some stability, the center is again facing turnover.
“You’ve just got that eerie sense in the back of your head again: We were here before and I don’t want to go backward,” Babcock said.
The nonprofit child care center is licensed for 48 children, but does not have enough staff or space to run at full capacity, Babcock said. It currently has 30 children enrolled and there were an additional 88 children, primarily infants, on the waiting list as of last week.
The center currently has seven full time employees, which allows them to meet state-mandated student to teacher ratios with two teachers per classroom. If the center was to expand to full capacity, the number of teachers required depends on the age of the children enrolled.
The Upper Valley needs as many as 3,800 more child care slots to meet current demand, ECEA Executive Director Amy Brooks said. Of those, there are between 650 and 800 currently licensed spots that are not available due to inadequate staffing.
Even operating at a lower capacity is a challenge. With low staffing due to limited funding and a tight budget, Babcock said he has had to close the entire child care center or certain classrooms if even a single teacher calls out because it will not meet required student-teacher ratios.
Median salaries at Twin River are $22 an hour this year compared to $17 last year, according to Babcock. These rates are higher than the Upper Valley average of $13 an hour for entry level child care positions, according to a survey conducted by the Early Care and Education Association and reported by Brooks.
The association provides support for child care centers and providers in the Upper Valley. The group has brought in leadership and managerial support to help Twin River’s Board of Directors navigate the ongoing challenges.
“This is a job from the heart,” Brooks said at the children’s center last week. “This isn’t about getting rich.”
When he drives around Lebanon, Babcock said he can’t help but observe help wanted signs at places like Home Depot and McDonald’s that offer similar rates.
“Why would you do this unless you loved it?” Babcock asked. “That’s, I think, the biggest struggle that we have and I don’t know the answer. How do you pay staff more and keep it running without raising the cost of daycare?”
As board chair, Babcock said he constantly struggles with how the children’s center should balance tuition costs with what families can afford.
In addition to being president of the board, he is a nurse and his wife is a teacher. The couple has two children who are 3 years old and 4 months old.
“You have to put on the board hat and be like we need to raise tuition, we can’t afford this, and then you put on the parent hat and you’re like this is too expensive, I can’t afford it,” Babcock said.
Twin States differ
One solution to boost Twin River Children’s Centers’ financial situation, Babcock said, could be raising support at the state level, especially in New Hampshire.
About a dozen of the 30 children currently enrolled at Twin River receive child care subsidies from New Hampshire or Vermont.
“Having the subsidies give you a set amount of money every year so you can budget,” Babcock said. Without set subsidies, the child care center has to rely heavily on “unstable” grant funding and tuition payments from parents.
Though state subsidies are more reliable, it is an ongoing challenge that the funding from the Twin States is not equal.
In 2023, Vermont passed a landmark child care bill, Act 76, that increased reimbursement rates and eligibility for the state’s child care financial assistance program, and created new technical assistance programs, grants and other support for child care providers.
For families who meet monthly income requirements, Vermont will pay up to $495 a week for infants in full-time care, $465 for toddlers and $439 for preschool-age children.
At Twin River and at other Upper Valley child care centers that accept Vermont’s subsidies, Brooks said changes from Vermont’s Act 76 of 2023 have raised revenues and made a big impact.
New Hampshire’s child care scholarship program offers a maximum weekly rate of $344 for infants in full-time care, $317 for children up to age 3 and $280 for children ages 3 to 6½.
Both programs include cost sharing for families, but New Hampshire’s kicks in for families at a lower income threshold. The Vermont program is also accessible to families with higher incomes than its counterpart in New Hampshire.
Currently, unsubsidized tuition at Twin River costs $325 a week for a toddler and $412 a week for an infant.
Democrats support changes
Last week, New Hampshire legislators toured Twin River Children’s Center.
After seeing the facility, state minority leaders Sen. Rebecca Perkins Kwoka, D-Portsmouth, and Rep. Alexis Simpson, D-Exeter, both said that New Hampshire should expand its child care scholarship budget.
As the system functions now, we are “asking those who are working the hardest in our communities — nurses, firefighters, teachers — to pick up the volunteer work” that is required to run a child care center, Simpson said. Meanwhile, the state has “child care workers who can’t pay for their kids to be in child care unless they have child care subsidies.”
Perkins Kwoka said the Legislature has had the wrong priorities when it comes to funding child care, such as dedicating $87 million over two years in the most recent state budget passed this summer to an expanded school voucher program instead of to child care.
The New Hampshire Legislature did expand the state child care scholarship program in the previous 2024-2025 budget cycle by increasing eligibility, reducing family cost shares and increasing reimbursement rates for providers.
Since the program was expanded, enrollment increased by about 30%, according to a February report from the New Hampshire Fiscal Policy Institute. Research from the institute suggests that further investment in child care at the state level could help increase stability and workforce recruitment for the sector.
For every person that goes into child care work, on average eight other people can return to the labor force, Brooks said.
Opposition to expansion
There are a handful of bills proposed for New Hampshire’s 2026 legislative session that concern child care funding and support. The full text of these proposals is not yet available, but some would expand resources while others propose cuts.
State Rep. Len Turcotte, R-Strafford, proposed that the state repeal a child care grant program administered by the Department of Health and Human Services.
Turcotte’s proposed bill would repeal a $15 million allocation for recruitment and retention grants for child care programs that was included in the state budget “trailer bill” passed in June, Turcotte said in a Monday email.
Turcotte said the funding was “plucked into” the bill and he is a “BIG opposition guy when it comes to ‘the swamp,'” a phrase that typically refers to reducing government waste and the influence of special interest groups in politics.
“This is taxpayer monies being used to expand a social program. Each time we do so, the program is never repealed and we end up on the hook for ever,” Turcotte wrote.