MICHIGAN: Day care providers overwhelmed by autistic children; 'staff not trained for autistic behavior'

Sept 29, 2025, Detroit Free Press: Michigan child care providers say they're without resources to properly serve kids with autism

https://www.freep.com/story/news/local/michigan/2025/09/29/michigan-child-care-providers-kids-autism/86291956007

Child care providers face a storm of challenges in trying to achieve quality care for Michigan's youngest, from rising costs to limited state investment to high teacher turnover.

But when those kids also come to providers with special needs like autism, it can exhaust an already stressed system.

Child care providers of children age 4 and under say they often find themselves feeling ill equipped to take care of and teach those with either diagnosed or undiagnosed autism, with no additional state funding and little support. 

The result: Parents can often find themselves being called in the middle of the workday to pick up their child who’s having a meltdown. And in the worst case scenarios, their child might be expelled from their child care. Child cares have an expulsion rate that is over three times that of the rate for kids in the K-12 system, one study showed.

“Parents are desperate to find child care providers who are sensitive or experienced or understand autism specifically,” said Jocelyn Cook, vice president of marketing and client services at Healing Haven, a program providing therapy to kids with autism to children 2 years old and up at clinics in metro Detroit.

Betty Favors, who owns center-based child care Cribs 2 College Academy in Detroit, said she feels frustrated that child care owners and teachers are often expected to take on important responsibilities like this without the proper resources.

“Stick them in child care, who cares,” is how Favors said she feels treated as a provider.

Favors and Lorna Parks, who owns House of Joy, a home-based child care that has been open for nearly 30 years in Detroit, say they need more state funding for hiring classroom support staff and therapists, training for themselves and their teachers and funding for adaptive equipment that meets kids' learning needs.

The two are teaming up to open their own site specifically targeted to care for young children with autism. They have partnered with a third co-founder Monique Dalton, who works as a Head Start parent advocate and also a case manager for adults with intellectual and developmental disabilities. They hope to open the site in early 2026.

This kind of combined child care and therapy center would be a unique offering that will fill a need, particularly for working parents, said Cook.

“There aren’t enough of these centers in Detroit, in the perimeters where our parents live,” said Favors. “We want to pull this together and make it work for all the children in the community that need us.”

Stress on providers

The teachers at Favors’ traditional child care center sometimes get overwhelmed by the behavior of some of the children at the site, many of whom have not been diagnosed but show behavioral patterns indicating a potential developmental disability, Favors said.

But she said she can’t afford training for herself or her teachers to learn how to better address their needs, nor can she afford to pay her teachers more than around $16 an hour, which she said leads to constant staff turnover.

“Staff are not trained for autistic behavior. They are not analysts, they are day care providers,” Favors said.

For Parks and Favors, the majority of their kids are on the state’s child care subsidy because parents in their area make too little to afford the high cost of care. But what the child care centers get paid by the state isn’t nearly enough to pay for all the additional support needed to care for and teach this population of kids, they said.

Parks says she ends up paying out of pocket for necessary things like adaptive equipment, including special pencil grips, sensory toys like drums or picture cards that help kids communicate their needs and minimizes tantrums, in addition to special needs training she regularly attends in order to continue learning how to best work with her kids.

Parks works alone with her classroom of seven, but said she’d like to be able to afford a specialist to work directly with kids or even another teacher to help manage her classroom with multiple kids who have autism.

“A kid might hurt others or you,” Parks said. “They have no sense of danger.”

Parks recalls a distressing moment when three kids under her care opened her locked front door and ran out. . .

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They said they believe the state should pay more to providers who care for kids with developmental disabilities so they can afford to pay for the kind of focused support the children need.

Being able to address kids’ needs in child care becomes especially important when parents are in denial, Favors says, and won’t get their kids evaluated by specialists and connected to services outside the classroom. Providers are then left to address the issue on their own.

The state does fund the inclusion of classroom support coaches who are able to help teachers problem-solve how to address kids’ needs and behaviors in its universal Pre-K program, known as GSRP.

This provides an added layer of built-in support in 4-year-old classrooms that infant and toddler classrooms don’t all have access to, said Madeline Elliot, policy and programs associate at Michigan’s Children. 

Because of the lack of funding, even though many child care providers would like to serve kids with disabilities, they either can’t, eventually expelling them from their programs, or they struggle through trying to do so, said Elliot.

Child care, resources for parents of young kids with autism few and far between

When resources are limited for providers serving young kids with autism, parents feel the burden, said Elliot.

There are five large-scale applied behavior analysis therapy centers in or bordering Detroit, according to Casey Maclean, regional operations manager at one of the centers, MetroEHS. Demand for these services is growing, he said. 

And while many centers offer a comprehensive source of therapy for kids, none of them also provide child care. These therapy clinics provide interventions aimed at developing communication, social and independent skills in kids with autism, but across Michigan, wait lists to get into them are infamously long, Cook said. While Healing Haven's wait list averages four to 12 weeks, for some providers the wait can be up to two years. 

Once a child gets into a therapy center, these centers often serve as the de facto child care for a family. But when a child doesn’t have a full time therapy plan, parents still have to find child care for their kid for the hours they’re not in therapy. This can be difficult to find, expensive, and requires parent’s time to shuttle around their child to different locations.

For kids between birth and 3 years old who have developmental delays or disabilities, Early On is a state-funded program that provides free evaluation and coordinates in-home intervention services, like speech or occupational therapy. Elliot called the program underfunded. The most recent state budget allocated $24 million to Early On, even as one cost study suggested the program would need something closer to $270 million in state funding to adequately serve kids across the state.

As a result of lacking state and federal funding and the differences in local funding available through things like millages for early intervention services across the state, young kids with special needs like autism get varying levels of support depending on where in Michigan a family lives, Elliot said. 

A new child care center that has ‘everything under one umbrella’ for kids on the spectrum

At Parks’ and Favors’ upcoming center, Beyond Limits Autistic Behavioral Therapy and Child Care, parents will be able to get therapy in addition to child care that meets their needs all “under one umbrella,” Favors said. . . .

Kids will get evaluated by board-certified behavioral analysts at the center, who will create an intervention plan that on-site applied behavior analysis therapists will carry out with each child. Children will see a therapist at least three days a week to work with them on their specific needs, said Dalton. . . .

The child care center doesn’t have an official opening date, though they hope to have one by January 2026, Dalton said. Right now, they’re in the process of getting the center finished and their child care licensure approval through the state.

Favors said she has already heard from many fellow Detroit-based child care providers who are excited for the site to open, especially because it will mean parents can get young kids help in the city. 

“We want to see the best for our little ones,” she said. “We need more for the children.”