Moody launches new child care website

  • Published
  • By Airman 1st Class Kathleen D. Bryant
  • 23d Wing Public Affairs
MOODY AIR FORCE BASE, Ga. --  Moody's Child Development Center, Family Child Care and Youth Programs launched a new website Oct. 20, here that will make it easier for parents to apply for child care on base.

The website, Military Child Care, is a new Department of Defense program that will save time and alleviate the process of applying for child care. It will enable families to create a household profile, search for and request care as well as manage their requests from anywhere in the world.

"I'm looking forward to using it when I move because you can get on the waitlist or even get a spot before you get to a new place," said Marisa Beasley, 23d Force Support Squadron child and youth program assistant who has two children enrolled in the MCC program. "I like [the website] better because you don't have to physically come into the building to do any paperwork. You can do it from home and as soon as you hit submit you will receive an email with directions on what to do next."

The MCC program makes it easy to navigate the different programs. It covers children from the ages of six weeks to 12 years old and offers multiple types of care depending on the needs of each family.

"Being in this digital-age, it makes it a lot easier to just be able to do this on my cell phone and not have to call," said Elizabeth Keithley, 23d FSS training and curriculum specialist. "We've uploaded forms on there, so parents can print them, fill them out and hand them to us when they come in the first day. It expedites the process a whole lot for everybody.

"The great thing about [the program] being DOD-wide is that if someone is on a Navy base and they know they're coming here, they can go ahead and request care while they're at their Navy base," Keithley added. "That way, it's consistent over the different branches and anybody can use it."

Moody is among 20 Air Force Bases to use the program out of a total of 84 military installations. Approximately 50 families have taken the leap here, but it took time to make sure that the program was ready to go live.

"Prior to the launch, we worked for a good six to nine weeks transitioning to and learning about the website," said Keithley. "We transferred all of our waiting lists at all of our programs onto the website. Once we went live, the parents were able to go in and create their own accounts.

"Our active-duty members don't have to stand up here for an hour filling out paperwork and they don't have to come up on several different occasions to see where they are on a waiting list," Keithley added. "It's all on the website and it's not so much a waiting list anymore as it is an anticipated placement time."

The anticipated placement times are estimated wait times that can vary before a child is enrolled in a specific program.

"We've set those times based on how many people we see who need that particular age of care and based on how many children we already have enrolled right now," said Keithley. "We go in and change those based on our [availability], so they're not given a number on a waiting list anymore."

The website brings improvement to the CDC's system of doing things which was all done by hand prior to the website launch.

"The parents came in and filled out a form requesting for care," said Helen Reeves, 23d FSS child development center director. "We would put that form in our binder and then we had to go through the binder and manually figure out who is next and call people to ask if they still want care. That's all taken care of with the new system."

Parents looking to register for MCC can visit the website and questions can be answered by any of the child care programs on base at the following numbers:

- Contact the Youth Programs at 229-257-3067
- Contact the Child Development Center at 229-257-9220