Smith College has announced the planned closure of its Center for Early Childhood Education at Fort Hill in June 2027. Per the college’s letter, the reason for the closure is not financial, and they intend to provide “flexible childcare benefits” to employees that can be used at other childcare providers. This is cold comfort to Smith families, who know just how scarce openings at local daycares and preschools are — what good is a benefit that you can’t use? — and no comfort at all to Fort Hill families who aren’t affiliated with Smith College. For them, their children’s beloved school will cease to exist and all they will receive in return is a panicked scramble to enroll elsewhere. Local capacity is already strained. About 90 children are enrolled at Fort Hill. Where will they go? The administration of Smith College did not care to address this question.
Not caring is the college’s approach. How else to explain the dismissal of the 30 excellent employees who make Fort Hill what it is? My child has been enrolled for four years, since he was five months old, so our family knows the school well. He has benefited from the teachers’ experience, insight, patience, and care. It breaks my heart that Smith College would dismiss the teachers who have skillfully guided him through learning to eat, walk, talk, and read. To use a crayon and a camera. To recognize musical notes. To remember friends’ names. To share and take turns. Smith means to kick to the curb the teacher who stroked my son’s back when he could not settle for a nap. They would toss out the teacher who held him after he fell and needed stitches. If the school was failing financially, I could perhaps force myself to accept this as a tragic necessity, but it isn’t. How am I to understand this closure, except as cruelty? To treat devoted workers like this — to close their school permanently, with very little reason given — is an outrage.
It is, unfortunately, an outrage that feels familiar in our country. Early childhood education is the foundation, not merely of our economy, but of human society. Yet we have no respect for the people who do this vital work, whether they are parents or professionals. We don’t pay daycare and preschool teachers enough. It’s some of the hardest work there is — and the most thankless. No wonder there aren’t enough daycares in town. I know Smith College is not capable of fixing the broken landscape of U.S. childcare, where families can’t afford tuition and educators can’t afford to live — only the federal government can do that, and our current one specializes in breaking things, not fixing them. But until this recent announcement, Smith had been making a positive contribution, allowing Fort Hill to flourish. I had mentally classed them as an institution that was working toward a better world. We need more of those.
But if it closes Fort Hill, Smith would not merely destroy the community that the school nurtured: the children and their friendships, the bonds between teachers and children, the staff union, the warmth among parents who pass each other every day at pick-up and drop-off. No, it is not merely a leveling of this community, but an inversion. Smith is creating scarcity where there used to be sufficiency. Now these families, who once planned playdates or cheerfully waved in passing, will be pitted against each other in the scramble for the few available local childcare options. Fort Hill is one of the only places in Northampton that cares for babies. In this void of care, how will Smith’s planned childcare subsidy help families with infants? What use is money if there’s nowhere to spend it?
Fort Hill has existed for 100 years. In 2026, it is filled with singing children every Friday morning. A garden thrives in its playground, surrounded by children pedaling trikes, chasing each other, laughing, swinging, finding bugs, zooming trucks, making mud pies, and wearing traffic cones as hats. They are amazing, mastering language and navigating social complexities with the help of their teachers. It is a good place. I wish we lived in the kind of world that would sustain such a good place, instead of the world where Smith College stamps it out.
It doesn’t have to be this way. Instead of firing its early childhood educators, the college could take inspiration from them and choose to nurture a better world.
Rachel Tapley lives in Easthampton.