Early-Ed Center Offers Teachers Housing

Seven-plus years of work in childcare offered Cynthia Howard no cushion when divorce and surgery costs pushed her into homelessness.

She now has her own apartment again — thanks to her workplace’s efforts to break cycles of poverty in the childcare industry by providing free housing to employees.

“This is not a gift or charity. We are paying women what they should be paid and counterbalancing a racist and sexist history,” said Friends Center for Children Executive Director Allyx Schiavone. ​“If we were better subsidized, our staff could afford this on their salaries.”

One in ten childcare workers lives under the poverty line, according to the National Women’s Law Center. The median salary nationwide is $29,900, or less than $15 an hour. The typical salary for full-time, Black and Latina early educators is closer to $13 an hour and $11 an hour, respectively. These wages emerged from a long history of national ambivalence to white women’s presence in the workforce and to the health and family life of Black and immigrant women in general.

The Friends Center for Children pays well for the childcare industry. It’s still not enough to live and save in New Haven.

Schiavone argued that Connecticut, while a childcare leader among the states, still dramatically undervalues those working in early education. Government grants pay for 50 percent of Friend Center revenues, forcing the center to turn to tuition and philanthropy to make up the difference. The East Grand Avenue-based center has a sliding scale for tuition, so it would have to abandon core principles of providing childcare to all families to raise more money through tuition.

The nonprofit’s board helped find a solution to the living wage conundrum: provide housing, the most expensive component of many teachers’ lives.

Longtime Friends Center supporters Greg Melville and Susan Fox donated $750,000 so the nonprofit could purchase four homes for teachers. Three are apartments within one building in Fair Haven; another is a single-family house in Fair Haven Heights near the center.

Teachers volunteered to pilot the program, and the nonprofit selected among the volunteers based on need, family size, household income and whether they were in good standing in their position. The nonprofit used United Way’s Asset Limited, Income Constrained, Employed (ALICE) thresholds to determine need.

The Friends Center for Children aims to expand from two infant, toddler and preschool sites to four by 2025. In this vision, the center would employee 90 women and house 40 of them. The center currently houses four teachers. Schiavone hopes to house 12 to 19 more in the next phase of the program.

A Stable Life

Financial stress during the Covid-19 pandemic overturned the stable career assistant teacher Cynthia Howard had built. Despite working at the Friends Center for seven years and running her own youth program, a series of life crises hit her all at once in early 2020. She went through a divorce and ended up paying most of the bills. She had an intense surgery and was recovering when the pandemic began in New Haven.

Preschools closed. The Friends Center did not ask students to continue paying tuition during that time. Teachers relied on unemployment benefits from March 16 through May 11, when the center rehired teachers on a Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) loan.

Howard started sleeping in her car in March, or sleeping at the house of her friend’s mother. Her depression spiraled enough that her best friend intervened to get her help.

Finally, in November, Howard felt well enough to return to teaching. She reached out to the Friends Center by email. This was when she first learned about the center’s housing program. Howard moved into her new Fair Haven apartment a day or two before she started work in January, ending her nine-month period of homelessness.

Howard’s story reflects what happens to women trying to live on childcare wages, according to Miriam Johnson.

Johnson is the emotional wellbeing coordinator for the center, which has meant everything from providing counseling to helping employees and student families deal with landlords trying to evict them during the pandemic. Johnson is also managing the free housing program.

Telltale signs show Johnson who is under financial stress. They show up to work less consistently, because they have to manage so many problems outside of work.

“They are withdrawn and resist connecting or communicating. It’s always crisis after crisis,” Johnson said. ​“There is a feeling of being unsuccessful, because they didn’t finish this or that.”

Schiavone said that it is ridiculous to expect those working at these wages to save money (or, relatedly, to expect childcare programs to run in a deficit). Still, shame shrouds her employees going through these financial crises.

Johnson has seen this shame and joylessness clear under the housing program. The women in the program are no longer in perpetual emergencies; they can suddenly take care of themselves and treat themselves to little luxuries.

“They are now free. They can dream. Someone told me that they never thought they would have this chance. It hit me deep that the system is not changing. We are hoping to disrupt that,” Johnson said.

When the Grand Avenue Bridge reopens, Howard will live within walking distance of the Friends Center. The apartment is fully furnished and makes her feel like a celebrity living in a New York loft.

Each participant in the housing program gets help budgeting as well as other financial coaching. Each participant has a goal that they are saving towards.

Howard’s goal is to build a home for herself. She wants to start her own preschool program, and many programs first start in the founder’s home. Early childhood education requires extensive training, per new state laws. A native New Havener, Howard is working on finishing her bachelor’s in early childhood education.

The main additions Howard has made to her new apartment are a TV and a crockpot. She cooks herself beef stew, corned beef and vegetable soup, among other dishes.

Her family members love to visit her in the new apartment. Her nephews look out on the water and beg to sail on the boats one day.

Every two weeks, she treats herself to a trip to the nail salon. Once in a while, she goes out to eat with her girlfriend or buys her girlfriend’s son a pair of sneakers.

“I used to focus my time on everyone else. That’s what was bringing me down,” Howard said.

She still experiences crises from time to time. She was devastated when the best friend who intervened to save her from depression died recently. She has managed to stay at work and stay mentally stable. Stable housing helps.

“You feel like you are a burden when you have to depend on others [for a place to sleep]. I’m still at work. I don’t think my mental health would be where it is now,” Howard said. ​“I think my friend is looking down on me and saying, ​‘Go live your life. I’m fine.’”

Experienced, Educated, Underpaid

Infant and toddler head teacher Marilyn De Jesus does consider the free apartment a blessing she never saw coming.

“I cried when I found out I was approved. It will help me with budgeting. It’s why I wanted to give this a try,” De Jesus said.

De Jesus moves into the apartment at the end of May, when she will be required to start paying rent to stay in her mother’s Section 8 housing. The rent help is a relief, because De Jesus has been supporting her husband in the Dominican Republic while he waits for legal permission to move to the United States.

The two met on De Jesus’ first trip out of the country since moving from Puerto Rico to New Haven as a teen. A mission trip in 2018 prompted De Jesus to stay in the Dominican Republic as an English teacher. In the process, she fell in love with the innocence and positivity of her now-husband, who worked in tourism. Despite previous prognoses from doctors that De Jesus could not have a baby, she got pregnant. In 2019, she made the hard decision to move back to Connecticut first.

De Jesus learned about the Friends Center when looking for a preschool program for her now 21-month-old, John Antoni. She loved the Quaker values that the center is based on and immediately pitched herself as an employee to Schiavone. After a formal application and interview process, De Jesus joined the center during the first month of the Covid-19 pandemic. Despite this difficult timing, she always knew that her job was secure and that the center valued her safety. This became particularly important when her husband lost his tourism job and had no safety net in the D.R. to fall back on.

De Jesus didn’t think much about the housing program until her mother’s Section 8 program asked her to either leave the house or start paying rent based on her salary. The percentage De Jesus sends to the D.R. shrinks her salary down considerably. Rent would leave hardly anything for expenses.

“It’s been challenging raising my son on my own. I’m technically not a single mother, but that’s how it feels,” De Jesus said.

She knows firsthand how different her budget would be in a different field. She left college partway through her degree to work at a credit union and made $62,000 a year. Now, she makes $32,000 a year as a classroom teacher with a decade of experience as a nanny and five years at another childcare organization. She is working towards a master’s degree in early education.

“It was the literal example of money cannot buy happiness. There was no joy in that job [at the credit union],” De Jesus said.

At the Friends Center for Children, De Jesus has daily moments of joy with her students and her own child. She sees her students learning to identify their emotions and communicate with one another. She reads with her son and sees him start to request to read books again (puffing out his cheeks to ask for the book about fish, for example).

Still, more money would definitely protect the happiness and passion she feels for teaching. She would be happy with making $50,000 if Schiavone had the funding. She has never seen any salary higher than that among preschool teachers. Even her current salary is better than what she made in her previous childcare job.

The free two-bedroom, Fair Haven apartment makes all the difference. She will get to move into an area with fewer shootings than her current block near the Yale New Haven Hospital. She is excited for the parks and sidewalks around her new home. She plans to save up to buy a house with her husband.

“I’ve never been given a blessing like this,” De Jesus said.