Finding Day Care that Accommodates Children with Autism

Day Care for Autistic Kids

About 1 in 59 children in the United States will be diagnosed with autism, according to estimates from the Center for Disease Control and Prevention. In Philadelphia, the parents and professionals in the autism field say that a lack of providers equipped to meet those needs often results in children on the spectrum being rejected by childcare providers, and they’ve had the experience of being forced to cut back work hours or quit their jobs entirely to stay home with their autistic kid.

“There just isn’t enough affordable, high-quality childcare for kids from birth to 5 anywhere in this city,” Clarke said, who directs autism services at SPIN; (SPIN’s autistic support classrooms serve children who are more developmentally delayed than some of their peers on the spectrum.) 

Kids can be kicked out of programs, she said, when childcare staff can’t manage the sometimes-difficult behaviors associated with autism. That’s if parents can find centers that will try to accommodate their children in the first place. The need for extra vigilance is a big reason and that’s why it can be especially hard to place kids on the autism spectrum in childcare.

Chris Spross, the director of SPIN’s center in Frankford, has first-hand experience struggling to find care for a child with autism. 

“It was difficult to find a before-and-after care for my son that was able to work with him,” Spross said. “He was thrown out of three-day cares.” Spross said his son’s challenges were too much for most childcare programs. Eventually, Spross’ son qualified for a government-funded home health aide who could give him one-on-one attention after school. (In Pennsylvania, children with autism can qualify for state medical assistance.) The aide still comes over to watch his son, who is now 13, until Spross and his wife get home.

Sometimes parents quit their jobs when they see no alternative but to stay with their kids themselves.

Sharita Cannion, 34, used to leave her 3-year-old son Micah with her grandmother, but an incident happened so Cannion left her job to stay home with Micah. She found one day-care provider she thought could work, but it wouldn’t take Micah because he wasn’t potty-trained. Now, Cannion said, she’s getting by on unemployment benefits and Social Security while she tries to get him into a preschool program for kids with autism. She was interviewed by Joel Wolfram who contributed to WHYY News.

Even though many children on the autism spectrum do fine in a typical childcare setting with some extra support, Clarke and other professionals in the field said there still aren’t enough programs equipped to work with them.

When these children do find a day care or pre-K program that will accept them, they can receive outsourced therapy and behavioral support services on site through the city’s early intervention programs for children with special needs. In Philadelphia, Public Health Management Corp’s ChildLink (PHMC) coordinates early intervention services from birth to age 3. During the preschool years, ages 3 to 5, early intervention services are provided through Elwyn.

Sara Molina Robinson, PHMC’s managing director for special education and support services, said a child’s team of early intervention providers will work to resolve any difficulties a day care center has meeting the needs of a youngster on the autism spectrum.

Brie Glover, a Philadelphia speech therapist who provides early intervention services in child care centers, said her job entails not just working with the children, but supporting staff at the centers. She’s going to try to problem-solve ways to help support the child so that this child can function in this setting. She was interviewed by Joel Wolfram who contributed to WHYY News.

If the day care program still isn’t working out, Molina said ChildLink service [THIS SHOULD BE LINKED] coordinators will try to help parents find another center more capable of handling kids with special needs. She said they are guided by Pennsylvania’s Keystone STARS quality ratings for child care providers when making a new choice. It assigns a rating from one to four stars. “The centers that are best able to manage the needs of children with developmental differences would be Star 4 and maybe some Star 3 centers,” said SPIN’s Clarke. (SPIN’s centers earn four stars.)

The problem, Clarke said, is “there just are an insufficient number of those centers around the city.” High-quality childcare centers are also more expensive. Working families in Philadelphia are already struggling to pay for care that’s merely average. The PCCY report, “Baby Steps to Improving and Expanding Infant and Toddler Child Care in Philadelphia,” found that only 1 in 4 children receiving state child care subsidies is enrolled in a three- or four-star center.

The median wage of a childcare worker in Pennsylvania is $9.71 an hour, according to the University of California, Berkeley’s Early Childhood Workforce Index for 2018. Fully 50% of these workers were receiving some kind of public assistance, such as food stamps or Medicaid.

PCCY’s “Baby Steps” report concluded that expanding the kind of high-quality childcare required by children with autism can come only with greater public investment. It called on the state to increase child care subsidies so that more providers can pay for the higher costs of quality care.