Joyful Noise is a warm and caring refuge with Winnie the Pooh and Dumbo on the walls and little folks sacked out at midafternoon.
Harmony Boyce says her 18-month-old daughter almost runs out of her arms to get to the daycare center in the morning.
"They were willing to work with me," says Boyce of this place in West Warwick, where hard times are pushing in.
Boyce says her mother had been caring for her daughter while she went to work. Then her mother got sick. Boyce was desperate to find daycare so she could keep her job. She called a bunch of places, visited some and found none that would even attempt to match her needs to her resources.
Then she found Joyful Noise in Emmanuel Lutheran Church on Leaf Street. And that huge cloud that hangs over so many single parents and working couples was lifted. Boyce found affordable daycare that she feels good about. It's like gold.
But all is not warmth and contentment on Leaf Street. The noise is still joyful. Two hundred kids well cared for will do that. And there is a long list of reasons to like this place - the high percentage of staff members who attended when they were kids; the teachers who work for very low salaries and no health care because they like what they do; the volunteers who spend hours and hours doing all kinds of jobs; the food sometimes sent home with parents struggling to make ends meet.
If you walk around Joyful Noise at nap time, check in on those slumbering under the watchful eye of staff members, it is difficult to imagine how really mean, ugly stuff - like guns and fire and politics - could intrude.
But after the mass murders at Virginia Tech in the spring, $2,000 had to be spent to update the security system at a small daycare center hundreds of miles away.
The new, more stringent state fire code has meant probably another $150,000 for things such as walls and doors and ceilings.
But the heaviest hit has come from the State of Rhode Island in the form of cuts in assistance for daycare. Those cuts cut into the heart of Joyful Noise.
Adrienne Zampini, the executive director, came to Joyful Noise as a kindergarten teacher 29 years ago. She says the director's job is not something she ever really wanted. But she is there now, in a very modest office with ongoing repairs all around her. She is sure she will keep the center running and not lay off staff. She isn't sure exactly how.
"I am a woman of great faith," she says. "I have holy water in my desk drawer."
The cuts in assistance meant some parents were facing a weekly jump of $90 in their copay for daycare. Joyful Noise is a nonprofit center with a sliding fee scale. It tries very hard to make daycare happen on what are often very tight family budgets. But some parents just couldn't afford the increase. Enrollment dropped. So did income. Expenses stayed the same. Zampini looks for bargains, for everything from cheese to paper towels.
Without daycare, some parents made it clear they would not be able to keep their jobs. So in cutting one form of aid, the state simply created the need for another.
Zampini says Joyful Noise will get healthy again with an increase in enrollment. She says she just needs to get the word out.
Harmony Boyce says it's a wonderful place. Without it, she says, she couldn't go to work. And if she couldn't go to work, she couldn't pay her rent. And if she couldn't pay her rent . . . .
bkerr@projo.com / (401) 277-7252
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