In 2018, the owners of Red Rooster Coffee in Floyd faced a growing problem.
Several of the company’s employees, including co-owner Rose McCutchan, were pregnant or had small children. They all wanted to stay in the workforce. And they all needed child care.
In Floyd, as in other rural communities, child care is hard to find.
Virginia does not currently have enough child care providers to serve the number of children who need care, according to a report issued by the Joint Legislative Audit and Review Commission in mid-October.
When child care is unavailable — or, more precisely, when affordable child care is unavailable — parents are more likely to reduce their work hours, change jobs or drop out of the workforce altogether, according to that report.
The Red Rooster Coffee owners were not going to let that happen.
“We had some just really amazing people working for us and we thought, you know, they want to work, they want to stay in the workforce and see their careers stay on track,” said McCutchan’s husband and business partner, Haden Polseno-Hensley.
One of Red Rooster’s guiding tenets is that it will provide a livelihood and a fulfilling work life for the folks who work for the company. This was the perfect opportunity to put that into practice.
So Polseno-Hensley and McCutchan went to work.
Several of the families had already organized a collective babysitting arrangement in which their children went to the same in-home provider for child care each day.
“That was great. It was awesome. [My daughter] was close by whenever I needed to feed her and [I could] go see her whenever I wanted to,” longtime employee Indya DiPietro said.
The Red Rooster owners decided it was time to formalize that arrangement. They began exploring child care center licensing regulations for an on-site facility.
At the same time, Floyd Montessori was closing its doors and Ella Zander, one of the school’s certified teachers, was looking for a job.
A student’s mother told Zander that Red Rooster was looking for a qualified person to set up a licensed child care facility, the connection was made, and Zander was brought on board as program director.
Later that year, Yellow Hen Child Care was born. With space for only 16 students, it is one of the smallest licensed child care facilities in Virginia.
“It’s been a really cool thing to be a part of, to start from the ground up,” Zander said. Now she works alongside Yellow Hen’s six teachers to provide instruction, guidance, scheduling and program planning.
Yellow Hen serves children ages 1 month through 12 years. It offers a pre-K and a toddler group as well as after-school care for older kids.
Most of Yellow Hen’s students are the children of Red Rooster’s 48 employees; enrollment is opened up to non-employees at a non-discounted rate as space allows. Polseno-Hensley noted that the center usually operates on a waitlist, however.
Red Rooster considers Yellow Hen an employee benefit and pays 70% of the cost of employees’ child care at the facility. Employees pay only $2 per hour per child, according to Polseno-Hensley. The rate increased from $1 per hour per child this month.
Outside of Northern Virginia, a typical family spends between $140 and $320 per week for full-time child care in a licensed center, according to the JLARC report, which notes that additional fees may be charged on top of these base rates.
In all parts of the state, these rates, which were self-reported by child care providers, exceed 10% to 20% of median household incomes of households consisting of one to two adults and at least one child. The federal government defines affordable child care costs as not exceeding 7% of a household’s income, according to the JLARC report.
In-home care typically costs less, the report stated.
Zach Wiley’s 2-year-old son, Simon, attends Yellow Hen while his dad works in the roastery. Prior to enrolling his son at Yellow Hen a year and a half ago, Wiley and his wife, who works at home, had hired a part-time nanny.
“It’s crazy how much you pay for child care. So I don’t know what we would do [without Yellow Hen] because we couldn’t … one of us couldn’t stay home,” Wiley said. He and his wife are expecting a second child this month.
Floyd County families are struggling to afford child care, according to Lydeana Martin, the county’s community and economic development director.
“It’s kind of a combination of the availability and the cost,” she said, noting that child care professionals’ wages have increased, thereby causing the cost of care to increase.
“That makes it cost [more] for people that themselves have very modest wages,” Martin said.
“When you’re in that position, especially in a small town with limited child care options, and in a place where maybe the expectation is that the wife or mother will stay home with the child, [or] if there’s a single parent, or if the mother wants to keep working, you sort of realize that … the options are really difficult. In many cases, you’re working for the cost of child care,” Polseno-Hensley said.
“It’s a really smart thing to do when your workforce is young and you want to be able to retain people,” Martin said.
In counting a demand for 140,000 additional slots for child care, the JLARC report found that 10,000 of those are in the western district, where Floyd County is located.
According to the Department of Social Services website, Yellow Hen is one of only seven child day centers in Floyd County. Five of them are licensed by the Virginia Department of Education; the remaining two are religious-based centers that are not required to be licensed.
Of those seven child day centers, four are clustered in or near the center of the town of Floyd, where Red Rooster is located.
Those centers currently offer 236 slots, the Education Department says, while there are approximately 734 children under age 5 who live in Floyd County, according to the Census Bureau’s latest estimates. Many of these places only provide half-day or half-week options, do not care for infants, or do not provide after-school care for older children.
“Most every community is really struggling to make sure that their families have access to child care opportunities … as well as being able to afford it,” said Kathy Glazer, president of the Virginia Early Childhood Foundation.
“I love hearing about employers really jumping in and realizing that if they want their people to show up reliably for work that they need to figure out some creative solutions,” said Glazer. She referenced the combination child care/workforce hub that United Way of Southwest Virginia is planning in Abingdon, and the child care centers that Ballad Health has opened at its health care facilities in Southwest Virginia.
“[I’m] so thrilled to see those innovations happen, but I have been worried about families who work for smaller employers who may not have the resources and capacity to do it. I think that’s why I’m so thrilled to hear about Red Rooster. [It’s] really inspiring,” Glazer added.
* * *
Yellow Hen is mere steps from the Red Rooster coffee shop and roastery, through a locked doorway.
Entering the space, children and visitors alike are greeted with a smile and a reminder to remove their shoes and hang up their belongings.
Two large rooms dominate the space. One is for primary activities: reading, crafts and free play. The other is for recreation when the weather doesn’t cooperate for outdoor play: parachute play, freeze tag and oversized games of flyswatter hockey.
There is also a nursery, a napping room and a kitchen and snack area. The furnishings are small and cozy, built for small bodies and daily play.
This is a child’s space. The adults are merely visiting.
“We’re nowhere near [as] formal [as] Montessori. But I have some of the setup that a Montessori school would use,” Zander said.
That environment includes open shelving to allow students to choose their own activities and individualized spaces for self-directed play.
“I hope that [the students] come away with all of the confidence that comes from growing up safe and respected,” Zander said.
She says that she wants the parents she works with to know that they work in a place where they know that their kids are safe and that they are right where they can see them if they look out the window.
To achieve that, though, Zander has to work through some tough scheduling conundrums.
The school is open when the roastery is open. That’s unlike what traditional child care providers and schools encounter when they set their schedules and plan their staffing needs, Zander said. Scheduling around 16 families’ work schedules takes a hefty dose of flexibility and creativity.
“Usually, the school sets out its plan and its classrooms and its schedule and then it takes the kids to fill the spaces that they have,” she said.
“For us, we start with the employees and the children that they have. We design the entire program around them, and so as the age groups shift, what we offer shifts as well.”
That means sometimes Yellow Hen might serve eight preschoolers and two infants, while those numbers might flip-flop at other times. The staffing and space requirements then change as a result, according to state licensing standards.
Zander might face similar, though possibly less dramatic, changes in a single week, or according to which staff members are working which shifts. Sick kids also affect the schedule, she said.
“We are extremely flexible, not just about things like that, but about scheduling and making sure that the staff that we have available is what is required for the kids who need to be here. Because all the parents have different schedules,” she said. Some Red Rooster parents work 40 hours a week, while some might only need child care for three hours in the middle of the day.
“If it were on a larger scale, I’m not sure it would be entirely manageable. I think that I spend most of my days managing schedules and trying to figure out who is going to be in at any given time, and that is not a normal situation,” Zander said.
“Things are very fluid and change frequently and we sort of roll with the punches,” she said, crediting Polseno-Hensley and McCutchan for finding compromises to work out what’s best for everyone in each situation.
“The benefits of on-site child care can’t be overstated, partly because it positively affects all parents’ ability to work, but also because it helps with the emotional part of going to work while raising small children by keeping the kids close and allowing kids and parents [to] still feel connected throughout the day,” McCutchan wrote in an email.
For Zander, Yellow Hen is more than a child care facility — it’s an extension of the Red Rooster family.
“A lot of the people who work at Red Rooster have known each other for years and years and years. A lot of their kids knew each other incredibly well even before Yellow Hen started. I don’t think that there’s anywhere else that I’m aware of that, you know, has as much of a close-knit community. It really feels like family,” Zander said.
The relationships that have formed at Yellow Hen are significant. They reflect the focus that Polseno-Hensley and McCutchan place on their community.
“Part of the nature of what we do and part of the thing that makes Red Rooster who we are is the fact that we’re from Floyd, the fact that we’re from this small town. You know, we produce world-quality, world-class coffee in a town of 450 people. That is a rare and unusual thing to find. And we’re really proud of it,” Polseno-Hensley said.
DiPietro and McCutchan were pregnant at the same time, DiPietro said. Her daughter, Violet, and Polseno-Hensley and McCutchan’s son, Aloysius, grew up in child care together, first at the collective babysitter’s home and then at Yellow Hen.
“They’ve been friends their whole lives,” DiPietro said.
DiPietro has worked for the company for at least 10 years, she said. Now, she is a managing partner of the Red Rooster Cafe and Bakery, the coffee shop that is attached to the roastery.
“I was a single mom. And so working was what I had to do. And then having just enough to afford my bills and take care of my baby… so having something that was affordable —” DiPietro said, trailing off.
“As an owner, I might have a slightly different experience, but the ability to visit your child … and if you’re a nursing mother, for example, and to be able to just go and see your child and sit with them for a half-hour at a time … I think it brings so much peace of mind to the parents,” Polseno-Hensley said.
