North America’s Largest For Profit Child Care Organizations
Each year, Childcare Exchange Magazine, one of the foremost child care program periodicals, publishes The Exchange Top 50, listing the largest for-profit child care organizations in North America. The Exchange Top 50 is the equivalent to the Fortune 500. The list of the top 50 for-profit child care organizations is a benchmark eagerly awaited every year.
Over the years, Little Tyke has remained steady on the list, making the 45th spot for the 36th Annual Status Report on For-Profit Child Care. Little Tyke is proud to announce the celebration of 50 years of service in May of 2022.
“We are once again pleased to be on the list,” said Brandy Little, Vice-President of LTLC. “Little Tyke has displayed unwavering consistency over the years. We have persevered and weathered through Covid-19, and this turbulent economy; but unfortunately, it’s not over yet. “
According to Childcare Exchange, for-profit child care companies operating multiple centers in one or more metropolitan areas have grown by nearly 10% since 2009. “We are always looking for the perfect opportunity for growth”, said Vice-President Little “However, we are taking advantage of this recession to improve what we already have in place. 8 out of our 11 centers have achieved State Accreditation status. We have been remodeling our current facilities, upgrading playgrounds, as well as, encouraging CDA’s for all staff etc.
“We are grateful to have been named along with so many other great organizations,” said Alex Little, President of Little Tyke Learning Centers. “We are focusing on quality and education, improving our properties, basically improving what we have currently in place, instead of concentrating on growth. Take care of your nickels and dimes and let the dollars take care of themselves, is what our father always preached to us”. In other words, we are advancing very conservatively as we enter the second quarter of 2022.
Public Schools Remain a Major Threat For the past decade, when for-profit operators were asked in our annual surveys to identify the most serious threats facing their organizations, ‘competition from public schools’ has ranked among the top three concerns. As the owner of Little Tyke Learning Centers noted in this year’s survey, “Crowd-out is an unintended consequence of free public Pre-K that occurs when government-funded Pre-K becomes available and parents switch from private to public Pre-K. For the past ten years, we have been competing with the public schools.” When a state launches a Pre-K initiative, it typically offers free or reduced-cost child care for children aged four and older (and in some cases two and older) through public schools. The result is that the existing centers in communities lose many of their older children and are left serving primarily infants and toddlers. Providing care for these younger children is much more expensive, and in turn centers cannot balance their budgets without the older (less expensive) children. As a result, in most states with public school-funded Pre-K, large numbers of centers have been forced out of business.
The Exchange has been tracking developments in the for-profit child care sector for 36 years. In their updates for this report, more than 60 for-profit child care organizations surveyed expressed cautious optimism about the coming year. Nearly two-thirds of the organizations in all sectors expressed intentions of adding capacity anywhere from 2% to 10% in 2017.|
For more information about the Exchange Top 50, visit the Exchange website to subscribe at www.ChildCareExchange.com. To learn more about Little Tyke please, visit their website at LittleTykeChildCare.com.
