Our daughter, Citrus, is almost three years old. It seems like only yesterday that she was not much larger than a rich amber ale.
Soon she will be transitioning into pre-K at the base CDC (Child Development Center), which has been great place for her the last year and a half. It’s just too bad we have to drive 24 miles to get there.
Pick your poison: Drive the Washington DC Beltway during rush hour, or drive through Washington DC. And cross the Anacostia river twice no matter what. (The meandering line shows the fastest route.)
For us, child care has been a paradox of military life. On the one hand, it is less expensive than civilian providers, the care is top-notch, and the teachers understand the unique issues that military children face. On the other hand, our last round of getting into a CDC was a nightmare and made a deployment and PCS move unnecessarily more stressful.
Elysia was already doing a geobachelor tour (living apart) so that I could keep my job in Washington when we learned that her command in Norfolk was going to deploy. Citrus was going to live with me in Maryland, and we immediately set out to get on child care waiting lists.
Civilian providers were quickly ruled out — we had a few month’s notice, but their waiting lists were longer than one year. I contacted Military OneSource, which provides case workers to help with such things, and they identified about 70 daycares within reasonable distance of our house. Not one had an opening.
We thought we were going to be okay because the CDC at the Army’s Walter Reed Annex is located 1.5 miles from our house and the nearest Navy CDC is 3.3 miles away at the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda. But it turned out that Citrus could attend neither.
Walter Reed takes Army families first, and NNMC first serves families who work on that installation. Because Elysia’s command was based in Norfolk we were way down the list. It made no difference that she was about to be deployed. It looked as though we could only get military care if I moved to Virginia, giving up my job. In which case I would not need child care.
We did stay on the Walter Reed waiting list for more than a year. The system was designed to kick us off the list. If you do not call every quarter, you lose your place. They generally did not return calls so I was rarely confident that we were still on the list.
After several months, Walter Reed introduced a new program which would guarantee a spot if you could show that you sought but could not find civilian care. If you didn’t try, you were removed from the list. But I tried only to be told that the program only benefited Army families on the list. We could only lose.
The last I heard from Walter Reed, in 2007 after Elysia came back from overseas, there was an influx of new Army families and we were bumped far down the list. We never heard again from them.
The simple explanation, we are reminded often, is that military child care is not an entitlement. Yet at the same time, various DoD officials state that providing services to military families helps retention rates in a time when every servicemember is needed. The bottom line is that on-base day care is a great benefit but there are not enough spots for everyone. You have to be a real advocate for your child.
As for giving priority to one service over another, I have no explanation. Soldiers and sailors are serving alongside each other overseas but their children may not be treated like “one of the family” depending on the base. Army vs. Navy vs. Air Force. Oh, and the 8 day care spots at the Coast Guard in DC.
In the end, and out of desperation, we found an opening at Bolling Air Force Base 24 miles away instead of at the Walter Reed CDC which is almost walking distance from our house. The care at Bolling is fantastic and at this point we are likely to stay there until we have to move.
In the grand scheme of things we really can’t complain about how things turned out. For all I know, things have changed in the last year (but good luck finding the CDC priority policies online). But we can still hope that it becomes easier for the next round of parents who are deployed.
2 Responses to “Mission: Child Care”
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Our daughter has been at the CDCII at Bolling since the beginning. The care there has been excellent. Unfortunately, we need her to be in daycare in Montgomery County. Its going to make us sad to leave.
We, too, got on the waiting list at WW CDC a long time ago. It still has not panned out. There are some good and inexpensive options in Montgomery County. Its just a matter of the waiting list. Try the community college and the other government agencies.
As for driving, we found its easier and quicker going through the city than around. Still brutal. Takes about an hour.
Today I got an email out of the blue from Walter Reed saying that we would be purged from the wait list (after being on it since 2006).
I imagine that we would find more options now that our daughter is older, although at this point we may as well wait to see where we will be for the next set of orders.
If anything, I don’t like how there is no consistency or transparency from one military child care center to the next, in terms of priority categories. I’m contacting Rep. Donna Edwards to see if she can get some light shed on the waitlists in our area.