DILLON — No matter where you live, daycares provide an essential service for working families and for the health, safety, and development of the small children they serve.
Now, a Dillon daycare provider who has worked with Butte 4-C's — a nonprofit based in Southwest Montana — for essential training and licensing requirements, is voicing her concerns after an announcement from the Montana Department of Public Health and Human Services (DPHHS) that their contract for provider services would be sent to an out-of-state, for-profit, online company.
"We’re not the city. We are rural Montana and we do things a lot differently here and we hope to keep getting that support," says Heather Larson, the owner of Heather's Zoo in Dillon.
Larson's daycare serves 45 children ages 0 to 10 years. She opened her daycare 10 years ago and she says the Butte 4-C's has been a crucial resource since the beginning, providing free FBI fingerprint background checks and free training that is necessary for licensure among other services.
"We have to have 16 continuing education credits a year and the Butte 4-C's provides a lot of those free credits in person, so you don’t have to take them online and interrupt your day or your night with your family," says Larson.
Larson worries the New York City-based Shine Early Learning, Inc. will not provide in-person services and she remembers a time when a behavior problem occurred and Butte 4-C's traveled to Dillon four times to help remedy the situation.
"If that gets outsourced to another state, those options aren’t going to be available. You call anybody at the 4-C's and that option is just not going to be available anymore. Now we could sit in queue for 45 minutes with no help and no one to show up," says Larson.
The announcement that Butte 4-C's will no longer carry provider services is stressful for Larson.
"It brings a lot of stress in an already stressful position and not being asked by our government, you know? We called our governor’s office and they had no clue this was happening and it’s not okay. I mean, this is our tax dollars," says Larson.
Butte 4-C's has 90 days to transition services, but during this period they say they will continue to serve providers; in fact, next week they will be in Dillon with Larson to provide an in-person training at Heather's Zoo.
Six people who work at Butte 4-C's will lose their jobs.
