Harbor Child Care fills education void

Richard Tedesco

Beginning with a play group in the basement of her house in Sea Cliff 37 years ago, Jill Rooney has developed Harbor Child Care into a non-profit business that currently cares for 800 children in six locations around Nassau County, including its current home base in the Herricks Community Center.

“I thought I’d make a little extra money,” Rooney said, recalling that she’d just walked away from a teaching job at a now defunct local nursery school that was offering to pay her $238 a week to teach kindergarten and drive a bus.

That was back in 1972. Her husband Tom was making $6,500 a year teaching English at Roslyn High School. So she started the daily play group with nine children – including her three kids – and the venture took on its own momentum from there.

Some of the parents whose children she had been teaching in kindergarten wanted her to keep teaching them, wherever she was. So by October 1973, she had 30 children in her care every day.

“It was at the time of the women’s movement and a lot of women in the community were newly divorced,” Rooney said.

A friend told her that what she was doing was illegal, so she consulted with a county social worker who told her she needed one other person to have the operation conform to local laws.

Rooney then hired someone she describes as an 18-year-old “flower child,” dubbed the enterprise Family Day Care Home and kept on educating herself.

Rooney attended night school at the New School in Manhattan, gaining a new perspective on her business from her teacher, Ellie Guggenheim, who had been a pioneer in the health-care field during World War II.

That’s how she learned about setting up a not-for-profit business, and she licensed the business and moved it into the Parsons Rectory in Sea Cliff in September 1973.

“I learned I could serve the underserved children, which I wanted to do,” she said.

Rooney didn’t know yet that she could be compensated to care for children who couldn’t afford to pay for the service. So she baked bread, sold it around Sea Cliff for $2 a loaf and also started a to sell homemade soup on a regular route around town just to keep the venture going.

“I was excited by what was happening,” Rooney recalled. “This was natural for me. I love taking care of kids.”

There were some very trying days baking bread to break even – like the day she came home to find several large bowls of bread dough spilling over the edges of the bowl as it was rising. And in the course of meeting her daily challenges, she became a vocal advocate for child care, starting to learn how to make here presence felt in the political community.

When she read about then Nassau County Executive Francis Purcell purchasing Ford LTDs for members of this staff, she instigated a demonstration outside Purcell’s office with parents carrying placards that read, “Kids, Not Cars.”

“We’ve been politicking ever since,” she said.

In 1978, the renamed Harbor Child Care purchased a turn-of-the-century landmark building in the Village of Sea Cliff with the help of the Roslyn Savings Bank and the local beach committee. It was one of only nine child care services on Long Island at that time. And in keeping with the tenor of the time, Rooney said its service was characterized by natural food, tie-dye shirts and day care providers strumming guitars.

“We created a model,” she said, as Harbor now took care of 78 children in its primary facility and 41 in St. Boniface Church.

Harbor’s first major expansion occurred in 1981, when it was invited to set up a facility in what was then the new Herricks Community Center at the recommendation of Herricks Assistant Superintendent of Schools Ira Singer. Today it maintains year-round programs in the Herricks Center for 300 infants, toddlers, pre-schoolers and school-age children.

Not long after that, Rooney was invited to open a facility in Manhasset by the North Shore-LIJ Health Care System.

Realizing the need for a center that would provide a unified approach to training for those providing care for infants, Harbor Child Care established the Training Institute for Infant Care Givers in 1984. Rooney estimates that the institute has trained more than 400 child-care teachers through that program over the years.

With the expansion into Glen Head, Rooney hired directors for that day care center as well Herricks and Sea Cliff, and became executive director of Harbor Child Care.

“I worked very hard. I was the cook and the bus driver. I knew all the jobs, so I hired all the people,” Rooney said.

After attending the first national child care and health conference in Minnesota in 1985, Rooney contacted the Nassau County Department of Health, and with the assistance of a pediatrician from Winthrop University Hospital and a nurse from Adelphi University, she established the Medical Advisory Board for Child Care Centers and Nursery Schools.

“Whenever I saw a gap in services, I tried to find qualified people to fill the gap,” she said.

She credits former Nassau County Executive Thomas Gulotta with giving her the political acumen to lobby for change, and organized day care directors to work with Gulotta and the county board of supervisors to establish a salary-enhancement program aimed at retaining qualified teachers.

Rooney said her husband Tom taught her and her staff members the essentials about preparing lesson plans.

“He was my mentor,” she said.

In the intervening years, Harbor Child Care opened three more facilities in Glen Head, Hempstead and Uniondale.

In 1996, it became the first child-care agency on Long Island to offer a class for special needs children in collaboration with the Interdisciplinary Center for Child Development. Over the past four years, it initiated universal Pre-K programs with the New Hyde Park-Garden City Park and the Herricks School Districts.

And after working for CBS Publishing, Tom Rooney started working as the marketing director for Harbor Child Care, marking a new phase of the Rooney partnership that includes their marriage of 48 years.

Jill Rooney has been recognized with numerous awards for her community service, and was inducted into the Long Island Volunteer Hall of Fame earlier this year.

“My legacy will be that there is nothing more important than the education and nurturing of a child,” she said.

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