Situated at the base of the Great Smoky Mountains, surrounded by old country stores and taffy shops, is a theme park that, for the staff who work there, operates like a self-contained community.
Dollywood Parks and Resorts is a destination for families to play, celebrate and be charmed by the Southern hospitality that the park’s namesake, entertainer and icon Dolly Parton, grew up on and has come to embody.
But someone has to do all that charming, and not everyone has the magic touch, explains Tim Berry, vice president of human resources for the Dollywood Co.
To attract the very best “hosts,” as resort staff is called, the company must be a great place to work, with excellent benefits and an environment where people feel supported bringing their full selves, Berry says, noting that the Dollywood Co. views its staff as its “differentiator.”
For years, Dollywood has been building out a suite of benefits for its employees, which includes an on-site family health center, a park chaplain, and full tuition coverage for anyone interested in furthering their education through the company’s partner program GROW U.
Those offerings have also, in recent years, expanded to include child care benefits.
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During the pandemic, company officials began hearing of the heightened challenges employees were facing in finding child care. Many noted in employee surveys that the programs in their area were full, and it was impeding their ability to work. (Nationwide, an estimated 16,000 child care programs closed permanently in the first two years of the pandemic, representing a loss of about 9 percent of all licensed programs in the U.S.)
The company had considered offering a child care benefit for its hosts in the past, including an on-site child care center where they could drop off their kids at the start of their shift and pick them up at the end. But the Dollywood Co. has a headcount of about 3,800, and not all of those employees are workin’ 9 to 5.
“Our need for child care (runs the) full gamut,” Berry says, “from traditional hours to odd, customized, unique needs for when people work.”
To make an on-site child care program available to all staff, Berry adds, the company would have to operate it 24 hours a day, seven days a week. That wasn’t feasible or practical.
Instead, as the need for a child care solution became greater, Dollywood found an alternative option in WeeCare, a network of child care providers.
Dollywood announces partnership with WeeCare
In the summer of 2021, Dollywood announced a partnership with WeeCare, describing it as an “unparalleled child care benefit” for employees. WeeCare’s charge is to match Dollywood employees in need of child care with one of the providers in its vast network, which CEO Jessica Chang says includes more than 65,000 child care professionals, about 6,000 of which are licensed in-home providers. To boot, the Dollywood Co. provides employees a monthly stipend toward the cost of care: $100 for each employee’s first child and $50 for every additional child.
That monthly contribution likely covers somewhere around 10 percent to 15% of Dollywood employees’ child care costs. In other parts of the country, though, it wouldn’t go nearly as far.
Just shy of two years in, Berry says the uptake of the program has been slow but is growing.
Last year, staff retention for Dollywood Co. increased by 11%. Berry can’t say for sure whether that’s from the child care benefit – the company is constantly making changes to nudge up that rate – but he acknowledges it’s a significant improvement.
“We’re going to do our best to keep it going,” Berry says, “and hopefully, other businesses will do the same.”
In fact, a number of other businesses are doing the same.
On the heels of the pandemic, which increased awareness among the American public about how difficult it is for families to find and afford child care and how essential child care is to business operations and growth, many companies are exploring their options, wondering how they could help their staff with child care in exchange for – the hope goes – less attrition and more satisfied, productive employees.
That slow, organic trend accelerated earlier this year. In February, about six months after the CHIPS and Science Act was passed, the Biden administration announced it would be requiring recipients of the $39 billion in federal subsidies from CHIPS to offer child care to employees. According to the U.S. Department of Commerce, semiconductor manufacturers applying for more than $150 million in federal funding must submit plans for providing care that is “affordable, accessible, reliable and high quality.”
The announcement was met with fierce rebuke and animated praise alike.
Some see it as a distraction from the real goal of getting the U.S. to treat and fund early care and education like a public good, in much the same way K-12 is.
“I see the appeal of this as a short-term way to expand offerings for families,” says Laura Bornfreund, senior fellow with the Education Policy program at New America, a Washington-based think tank. “But to me, it could take us down what I see as the wrong path for a long-term fix, becoming more of an employer-led benefit than the public investment we need.”
For others, it’s a clever workaround by an administration that saw its priorities for child care and preschool access largely left on the cutting room floor during congressional talks in 2021. And even if it’s not “the” solution, it’s “a” solution to the crisis that continues to escalate in the early care and education sector.
“At the end of the day, through something like the CHIPS announcement, we have more employers who are going to care even more about child care,” notes Anne Hedgepeth, chief of policy and advocacy at Child Care Aware of America, a national nonprofit that promotes quality, accessible child care. “Employers who have to experience and navigate the challenges of child care become employers who want to see a better system.”
When it comes to employer involvement in child care, the devil is in the details. Interviews with a dozen early care and education providers, policy experts, advocates and employers reveal just how complex and contentious this issue is.
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The reality is there are a number of existing and emerging models for employer participation in child care, each with varying degrees of success and scalability.
What’s clear, though, is that workplace child care benefits aren’t some abstract idea being floated by businesses or the U.S. government for some far-off future. They’re already here.
Employer-sponsored child care looks a lot of ways
When most people hear “employer-sponsored child care,” they are likely thinking of on-site child care. In this model, programs are established in the places where employees work and often in partnership with an outside child care provider or network, such as Bright Horizons or KinderCare, that is hired to build and operate it. On-site child care offers ease of access for families working in professions with traditional in-office structures but is often incompatible with employees who work nontraditional hours or in the field.
Yet this is far from the only model that exists.
Other approaches involve employers partnering with existing child care programs in the community to reserve slots for employees and a consortium model where multiple businesses come together to open a new child care program or partner with one that has already been established.
Some companies also offer “backup child care” for employees who may need an alternative option when their primary child care arrangements fall through. It’s designed to fill child care gaps that occur unexpectedly.
Then there are models that provide financial assistance to employees, such as offering pretax benefits like dependent care flexible savings accounts or providing monthly stipends to mitigate prohibitively high child care costs for families. This is what Dollywood is doing for its employees, to lift some of that cost burden.
It’s not uncommon for employers offering on-site and near-site child care arrangements to also subsidize the cost of employees’ child care. Dan Figurski, president of the KinderCare At Work brand, which partners with hundreds of employers nationwide, estimates the average employer contribution is about 20 percent of the cost of care, though KinderCare works with companies that cover up to 100% of the cost.
How the pandemic changed child care needs
In America, early care and education have long been treated as an individual responsibility. In a society that does not guarantee the right to early care and education the way it guarantees the right to a K-12 education, the onus falls to families to figure out where to find care, how to pay for it, and whether it’s high quality.
But the pandemic may have played a role in shifting the public’s mindset on this, with toddlers ambling into Zoom backgrounds and parents – primarily mothers – dropping out of the workforce to provide care during a time when it wasn’t widely available. These scenarios were thrust into the foreground, making visible to many Americans how little support this country provides to families with young children.
Many employers saw these tensions first-hand and recognized the need for a better solution, not least because, for the last few years, companies have been struggling to recruit and retain qualified staff.
While considering how to fill open positions, many businesses, like the Dollywood Co., opted to begin offering child care benefits.
KinderCare has seen the company’s At Work program balloon since the pandemic began, from serving about 400 employers in 2019 to 600 today. About 20% of the children enrolled across KinderCare centers nationwide are from families whose employers provide child care benefits, according to company data.
WeeCare, too, has seen rapid growth in its child-care-as-a-benefit program, which launched in 2021 and now includes more than 100 corporate clients serving a combined 300,000 employees.
Figurski at KinderCare believes it’s a win-win.
“The people (using) a child care benefit today – they stay longer, they’re more engaged,” he notes. “The upside for the employer is retention. The upside for the employee is access to high-quality care.”
Lowest-paid positions need solutions
While the pandemic raised the stakes for employers, it also helped transform the type of child care benefits many employees need and find attractive.
On-site child care is the most conspicuous manifestation of employer participation in child care. It has also tended to serve a certain slice of the workforce – the staff who report in person to corporate headquarters during regular business hours, not the shift workers that undergird those businesses. That helps explain why employer-sponsored child care is a divisive topic.
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Today, the office staff of large corporations are still working remotely at least some of the time, making the overall appeal of on-site offerings less potent.
Employers are adapting to that change. KinderCare’s Tuition Benefit offering, which allows families to apply their employer’s workplace benefit to any of the 1,500 KinderCare centers across the country, regardless of where the company is headquartered, has seen a 40% increase in participation since the pandemic.
Both Figurski at KinderCare and Chang at WeeCare are adamant that their employer clients are serving employees from all backgrounds and settings, not just the high-income professionals working at company headquarters.
Most employers coming to WeeCare for help, Chang says, are doing so because of acute staffing challenges in their lowest-paid positions, explaining, “If you don’t have grocery store clerks, you don’t have a grocery store.”
KinderCare’s clients include a number of hospitals. In those settings, Figurski says, the target clientele of the child care benefit are nurses and administrative staff, not surgeons.
The highest-paid professionals are “finding other alternatives” to child care, Figurski says, suggesting that those individuals are hiring private nannies.
At the Dollywood Co., Berry says it was important that all staff have access to the benefit, including the employees who operate the roller coasters, those who clean guest rooms and those who lead marketing and sales.
Still, if workplace child care benefits are becoming more common and inclusive, data shows that, among low-wage workers, it remains a rarity.
As of March 2022, just 6% of the lowest-paid quartile of civilian workers in the U.S. had access to child care benefits, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. By comparison, 19% of the highest-paid quartile of civilian workers did.
The debate around employer participation
The debate surrounding employer participation in child care goes something like this:
On one end of the spectrum, proponents posit that until large public investment in early care and education comes through, encouraging employers to have “skin in the game” by supporting families is one of a number of acceptable solutions that will keep the sector afloat.
Many of these supporters do want to see big, system-wide change. But after early care and education were cut during Build Back Better negotiations (later passed under the Inflation Reduction Act) and Republicans won back control of the House in Congress last fall, they saw a narrow window of opportunity slam shut – at least for now.
For them, the sentiment that has emerged is along the lines of, Let’s not let the perfect be the enemy of the good, and employer involvement, as they see it, is part of the good.
At the other end of the spectrum, those against employers’ involvement in child care argue that any stopgap solution is only diverting attention and resources away from the movement toward a better, publicly funded system for early care and education and may ultimately damage the long-term outcomes of that movement.
Hedgepeth from Child Care Aware believes that it’s far too early to judge the Biden administration’s actions around child care and CHIPS funding, but she remains optimistic.
“It could potentially lead to the best thing we can do with employers – having a plan, working with community partners to map needs and understand child care supply, ❨whether it’s) on-site or near-site or subsidies or partnerships,” Hedgepeth says.
Her sense is that the system may in fact be so dysfunctional that once employers are awakened to the realities of it, they will align themselves with those advocating for a major systemwide change.
Bornfreund at New America says she understands the appeal of employer support around child care, but with history as a guide, she worries about where it will lead.
“I don’t think we’ve had a great track record in the U.S. of starting small and just putting the good in place and actually going back to make fixes – real fixes – to make it better later,” Bornfreund says.
If our society accepts the idea of employers bearing responsibility for child care, she adds, then it’s easy to see how this workplace benefit will follow the trajectory of another: health care.
In the mid-20th century, health care in the United States emerged as a job-linked benefit due to a confluence of political and circumstantial factors following World War II. It stuck. Despite numerous efforts in the decades since, most people in America still have private insurance through their employers. The result is an expensive, convoluted health care landscape that tends to lock people into their jobs and yet still leaves millions uninsured.
If child care goes the way of health care, Bornfreund says, “it becomes even more of a challenge to fix than if we’d done it right from the beginning.”
Dollywood is seeing success
Since rolling out its child care benefit in 2021, Dollywood leaders have watched a growing number of employees take advantage of the offering.
“Once it’s socialized,” Berry says, “I think it’s going to eventually become the new minimum expectation. We’re trying to be ahead of the curve a little bit.”
As the company comes to better understand who is using the child care benefit and why, they are open to growing and expanding it.
What Berry doesn’t want the benefit to become is a form of so-called golden handcuffs, where employees feel “stuck” in their jobs.
“That’s certainly not what we’re trying to do. We’re just trying to meet their needs where they are.”
So far, based on the increase in staff retention Dollywood has recorded, Berry says the program seems to be working well in both directions.
“We’ll stick with it. We think it has some legs,” he says, adding: “There’s some momentum building around child care in our nation.”
This article was co-published with EdSurge. EdSurge is a nonprofit newsroom that covers education through original journalism and research. Sign up for their newsletters. Emily Tate Sullivan is a senior reporter for EdSurge covering early childhood and K-12 education.
