For the first two years of her son’s life, Maddy Pagliarulo stayed home because she and her husband were unable to afford day care.
“It is so expensive,” Pagliarulo, 28, of Topsham said. “It definitely makes it so people aren’t able to work.”
Once a spot opened up at the Bath YMCA, Pagliarulo was able to return to full-time work as a preservation technician at Bath Iron Works, which has been a relief for her family. To attract more people who want to work but are barred from doing so by a lack of affordable child care, some large Maine employers are stepping up to fill that gap.
Using federal workforce development funding, BIW will open up 150 additional child care slots beginning in 2025 in a joint project with the Bath and Brunswick YMCAs. Taken together with a recent housing project BIW won federal funding for, the company is taking a larger role in its employees’ lives and potentially showing other employers a way to address attrition.
“The three main issues from a workforce standpoint that really are [big] in Maine are housing, child care [and] transportation,” Ray Steen, BIW’s vice president of human resources, said.
Child care has become a significant concern in the last few years. After pandemic-era federal funding dried up, day cares were hammered by workforce shortages that forced many to shut down across the state. Maine was short by more than 3,500 child care slots as of 2021, according to an analysis from the Bipartisan Policy Institute. It was worst in rural areas.
BIW, which builds Navy ships, has a unique footprint. It has 6,900 employees as the state’s fourth-largest private employer, drawing workers from 15 of Maine’s 16 counties. Those employees have 900 children under the age of 6, and many of them came to the company for help with the difficult child care environment, Steen said.
That’s when BIW came up with the idea to use workforce development funds for child care. But it didn’t have the first clue about how to run a child care center, Steen said. The business found a natural partner in the local YMCA, where 1 in 5 children enrolled have at least one parent at BIW, according to Annie Colaluca, who leads early learning and family services at the Bath Y.
“It was interesting for [BIW] to approach us about that, and I think we both agreed that we just had more in common than not, about our desire to try and solve this issue for our community,” Colaluca said.
There is precedent here. In 2020, the Mount Desert Island and Ellsworth YMCAs announced a partnership with another regional employer, The Jackson Laboratory, to expand child care for workers on the company’s Bar Harbor campus. The Bath Y had already been working on a child care expansion with $1.5 million in congressionally directed spending for that in 2021.
Using that money, the center doubled in size from three to six classrooms this January. The day the expansion opened, the program was full with a waiting list that is now 12 months long, Colaluca said. As more and more other regional child care programs continue to close, that need is only compounding.
“We realize we’re not the only answer to all the problems, but because of all we had already been doing, it just put us in a really strong position for us to partner with Bath Iron Works,” she said.
The full price of the expansion has not been disclosed, but BIW has said it is paying for a new eight- to 10-classroom center alongside the Navy and the Bath YMCA. A Navy spokesperson did not provide information on costs after multiple inquiries last week.
The facility will allow shipbuilders to drop children off before most day cares are open. That had been a concern for Pagliarulo, who works early. The local Y has made an exception for Pagliarulo’s child, allowing her to drop him off early, but most centers don’t do that. The new center will also be located between the yard and BIW’s engineering offices, Steen said.
That would be a time saver for BIW parents like Vanessa Hamilton, who leaves her child with her mother before heading to work an hour away from her Palermo home. Hamilton, 33, has had to use vacation time before to travel and pick her daughter up early, she said.
“Having a child care close to my work would be very beneficial. For any type of appointment, I could just go pick her up,” Hamilton said. “I’d have my child more.”
Steen doesn’t expect this expansion to solve the child care issue. In the few weeks since the expansion was announced, 90 people have expressed interest in 150 slots. But the hope is it makes them an “employer of choice” in the area, he said.
“Businesses need to want their employees to work. Businesses have to have some buy-in, and they have to figure this out with us. We have razor-thin margins; everybody knows that,” Colaluca said. “I don’t have an answer for whether or not more partnerships are coming, but I feel that it’s encouraging to see this.”
