Service members and Department of Defense civilian employees will soon find accessing information about military child care options and wait lists as close as their laptops and mobile devices.
A new Department of Defense initiative, militarychildcare.com, will go active in March, giving authorized patrons in the National Capital Region a single gateway for comprehensive information on military operated or military approved child care programs worldwide.
"Each installation has the ability to tailor the site somewhat to their programs, so a family gets a sense of the program and what special programs it offers," said Donna Garfield, program operations specialist at Joint Base Myer-Henderson Hall.
What's changing
Childcare slots at military child development centers such as the Cody Child Development Center on the Fort Myer portion of JBM-HH are coveted by authorized users, said Garfield.
In order to get on the wait list for not only Cody but for other military child care centers throughout the NCR, authorized patrons must currently fill out paperwork at each individual center. That paperwork must be periodically updated every 90 days to indicate that the patron is still interested in getting their child into a particular center.
"Here at Joint Base Myer-Henderson Hall, we have such a long wait list that we are very strict about the 90-day update," said Garfield. "The assumption is if you don't update within the 90-day period, you are no longer interested in child care."
When the militarychildcare.com site goes active in March, users will be able to get on wait lists for as many centers as they would like, said Garfield.
"It takes the information in the DoD initiative about the wait list and puts it in one central location for all the services to use and ensures that all the services have the same priorities, that they are all playing by the same rules," she said.
Wait lists will be based on the following criteria:
Priority 1: Military service members or DoD civilian employees who have an employed spouse.
Priority 2: Military service members or DoD civilian employees whose spouse is not employed.
Priority 3: All other authorized users
"The challenge is the priorities the new DoD initiative has stated and that MCC implements are very, very different," said Garfield.
Current wait list procedure
Prior to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, Garfield said there was a child care facility on the Pentagon reservation itself. The facility was only available to authorized patrons who worked within the walls of the Pentagon.
"When 9/11 happened it was determined that having a child care center on the reservation was not the best plan of action," she said.
Instead, the Department of Defense opted to fund a new CDC on the joint base with priority for slots being given to service members and DoD civilians who were attached to either JBM-HH or the Pentagon. Under a memorandum of understanding between the joint base and the Pentagon, half of the child care slots at Cody are designated for those who are assigned to the Pentagon and the other half to those assigned to JBM-HH.
What it all means
When the militarychildcare.com site goes active in March, it will open available child care slots at Cody to authorized patrons throughout the NCR, and not only to those assigned to or attached to either JBM-HH or the Pentagon, said Garfield. Those currently on the list could see themselves either moved up, or even potentially down on the priority list, depending upon where each family falls on DoD's priority scale under the new program.
"The new initiative says military is military," said Garfield. "If you are a service member or DoD civilian, you are priority 1, wherever you are attached to."
For additional details about the DoD's Military Childcare program and website, to include instructions on how to register on the website, visit http://go.usa.gov/cPGWP.
Pentagram staff writer Julia LeDoux can be reached at jledoux@dcmilitary.com.
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