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Expanded child care programs offer parents peace of mind

  • Published
Do you need child care beyond normal duty hours? Have you just returned home from deployment and would like time to reacquaint with family? Does your child have the sniffles but you cant take the day off?

If so, your local family child care coordinator can help. Air Mobility Command Services offers various expanded family child care programs to help parents in situations in which normal child care arrangements are not sufficient.

These additional programs were put in place in our family child care homes to meet the needs that have come up, especially since September 11th, said Bette Doelger, AMC family member programs specialist. The programs include extended duty care, returning home care, and the newest program, mildly ill care.

The extended duty care program is temporary help beyond usual child care arrangements, to accommodate working extended duty hours, deployments, emergency care, and other unique situations.

When we started the extended duty care program, we were not seeing much usage, Ms. Doelger said. However, with more visibility and opening the program to Air National Guard and Air Force Reserve parents, she said now usage is out of sight.

The returning home care program offers up to 16 hours of free care, per child, for children 12 years and under. Care is provided in an EDC home to provide parents returning from deployments with free child care to ease their return to home station and family.

Mildly Ill Care, or MIFCC, is the newest program and is still in a pilot stage, currently being tested at six AMC bases: Andrews AFB, Md.; MacDill AFB, Fla.; McChord AFB, Wash.; McGuire AFB, N.J.; Scott AFB, and Travis AFB, Calif. If successful, additional bases will be added to the program.

MIFCC provides free care to parents when children are mildly ill; that is, conditions (such as a cold, mild fever) are not severe yet would prevent the child from attending their normal child care arrangements. Ms. Doelger said the program has been used to provide care to children who have suffered broken arms and were unable to attend the CDC during their convalescence.

MIFCC providers complete 14 hours of special training, in addition to their required training to become an Air Force Family Child Care provider. This specialized training includes subjects such as infection control procedures, care of children with mild, childhood illnesses, and emergency procedures.

While the EDC and RHC programs are heavily used, Ms. Doelger said the use of MIFCC is not nearly as high as expected. Each base provider is contracted for 600 hours per month, yet only 16 percent of the hours contracted have been used among the bases.

Were trying to figure out what we need to do to let parents know this is available, said Ms. Doelger. The mildly ill providers will begin to spend time at the child development and youth centers to meet parents and help them to enroll in the program.

Another obstacle is that not all of the bases have found providers for mildly ill care.

The challenge is that [providers] cannot have any children of their own at home under the age of eight, said Ms. Doelger. The ideal situation is to have a provider who has children in school so that during the day she has no children in her home except these children that are mildly ill. She said that she is working hard to find providers for the remaining bases and hopes to find them before the new contract period in January.

For more information, or to enroll in any of the expanded family child care programs, parents should visit their local family child care office. While parents are responsible for their normal child care fees, the additional care programs are free.

We have worked these programs hard and have been very fortunate in getting the funding from [the Department of Defense], said Ms. Doelger. Theyre saying Yes, this is a need. Were going to support our troops; go for it.

Air Mobility Command News Service is a service of the Internal Division
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