BETTER BENEFITS: SICK-KID CARE SERVES AS BASKUP TO WORKING PARENTS

NASHVILLE, Tenn. -- Meg Crisp knew she and her husband had a problem when their feverish youngest daughter climbed into bed with them.

Crisp could tell 7-year-old Leslie wouldn't be able to go to school in the morning. Yet Crisp, director of administration at Arthur Andersen, the consulting firm, and her husband, a public relations executive, both faced important meetings that would make it difficult for them to stay home with Leslie.

In a pinch, a guilt-ridden Crisp took the first-grader to Get Well Centers, a Nashville day care for mildly ill children. When she returned to pick her up, she found Leslie still groggy but happy to be toting home an armful of newly made crafts.

"She had a blast," said Crisp, who had never left Leslie in day care before. "She was not feeling well. She slept quite a bit. But she made all kinds of stuff. Her sister was jealous when she came home."

Trimming lost work days

Sick-child care is a growing part of the multibillion-dollar child care industry. The benefit is increasingly common as employers try to attract workers in a tight labor market and trim the costs of lost work days.

Almost every parent has faced the dilemma posed when the sitter is ill or snow closes schools. In response, 300 to 350 centers offering backup child care or care for sick children have sprung up around the country, said Jacqueline Stewart, president of the National Association of Sick Child Daycare. That's up from fewer than 100 a decade ago.

Some employers offer onsite sick and backup child care, while others contract with stand-alone help such as Get Well Centers. Life Technologies, a biotech company based in Rockville, Md., offers subsidized in-home care for sick children as part of its benefits package.

However, no day cares in Southeast Missouri offer sick-child service. Some daycare centers, like Just Kids, tried to offer the service but found that it would not be cost-effective for the parents, a teacher said.

A rainy-day center at St. Francis Medical Center wasn't used enough by employees' sick children to make it feasible. The program has been discontinued, a public relations official said.

Relieving parents' stress

Places like Get Well Centers may have found a lucrative niche. According to the NASCD, the average working mother misses five to 29 work days a year, at a cost of $2 billion to $12 billion to employers.

"It's absolutely growing," Sharman Stein, senior editor for Working Mother magazine, said of sick-child care. "It's a way for companies to relieve one of the working mothers' and fathers' greatest stress points."

Sick-child day care is for children who may not feel up to attending school or their regular day care, but who aren't seriously ill. Children who attend have ailments such as the flu or strep throat. Even teething can cause a mild fever and exclude a child from attending regular day care.

At Get Well Centers, which opened in 1999, children are sorted by age and illness into six rooms. Contagious children are isolated from others in a separate room, which includes its own air ventilation system and door to the street to avoid interaction with other children.

How sick care works

A registered nurse is always on site. Toys are cleaned after children play with them, and books are quarantined for 48 hours afterward. Parents receive two checkup calls daily and immediate notification if a child's condition worsens. Cameras also allow parents to monitor their children on the Internet.

Depending on how they feel, children can participate in various activities, such as field trips to the state Capitol a few blocks away. Because the downtown location offers no space to play outdoors, the biggest room is outfitted with a basketball hoop and child-sized play cars. Other rooms are furnished with bean-bag chairs, cribs and stacks of cots. Toys and books stock the shelves. Art supplies cram a hallway closet.

Justin Wagner, 6, who recently spent a few days at the center recovering from the chicken pox, said in some ways he liked the center better than home. He most enjoyed painting a snowman on the window.

"I can't paint on the windows at home," he said.

Get Well Centers has contracts with about 60 local businesses, and bigger firms pay bigger subsidies. Employees pay about $10 a day on average. Parents whose employers don't have contracts with the center pay $85 a day.

The staff of Get Well Centers works to allay the guilt many parents feel when leaving their sick children in a new place, said president Stephen LoJacono.

"It certainly is an obstacle," he said. "But once the parents see the facility, once they see how clean and bright the facility is, they have no problem leaving the child. It's like any other child care, really."

SICK-CHILD CARE NATIONWIDE

A breakdown of the types of sick-child care available across the United States:

* Hospital based: 40 percent

* In-home care: 22 percent

* Associated with well-child care centers: 17 percent

* Stand-alone centers: 7 percent

* For chronically ill and disabled children: 2 percent

* Family child care homes: 2 percent

* Other: 10 percent

Average cost a day per child: $65 to $120

On the Net:

National Association for Sick Child Daycare: www.nascd.com/index.htm

Get Well Centers: www.getwellctr.com/

American Academy of Pediatrics: www.aap.org/