Child Care at STOC

At STOC 2018 TheoryFest, we will for the first time provide pooled subsidized child care for registered attendees. Child care will be provided in a room right next to, and on the same floor as, the conference program. We will make child care available from 8:45am until 5:30pm (except on Friday, when child care will end by 4:00pm, or earlier, if there are no requests for afternoon child care).

We will organize child care through The Baby Sitters Guild, which comes highly recommended from past USC functions. They conduct background checks of their baby sitters and vet them. They also assured us that all sitters are 21 years or older.

Our aim is to have one sitter per 3-4 children, depending on the ages of children at the conference and their needs. The Baby Sitters Guild provides the personnel, but no games/books/program/etc. If there is enough demand, we might set up some entertainment ourselves, but you should best be prepared to bring some entertainment for your child to use. (Other conferences have been using a provider with significant organized activities. Given that this is our first trial run with providing child care, we are aiming to keep it simple and affordable.)

The rate for child care will be $40 per day (or any part thereof) per child for regular attendees, and $20 per day per child for students. In order to guarantee that you will receive child care, please e-mail the local organizers at stoc18childcare@gmail.com at least two weeks before the start of the conference. We will make an effort to accommodate later requests, but cannot make guarantees. In particular, if fewer than three children are registered two weeks before the conference, we may not be able to provide child care after all.

In your e-mail, please include the following information:

  • How many children and of what ages will you need child care for?
  • What days and times will you need childcare for? If you are not completely sure, give us enough detail to estimate expected numbers of children and concentration bounds for each day.
  • Any special needs your children may have, in particular if such needs might affect the number of sitters we would need to arrange for.
  • Any easily shareable entertainment/enrichment you are planning to bring, as this would help us in deciding what we might want to provide.
  • Whether you are a student or not.
  • Any other relevant information we should know.