thanks bucking_horn, I did manage to have success last night by switching out dhcphelper container with isc-dhcp instead and it worked with issues. I did not make any changes to my firewall to get this to work.
here is the link that details the docker file for the isc-dhcp container and docker-compose file.
I would still like to get it to work with dhcphelper if I can as isc-dhcp is overkill for this setup. There are two things I noted that are different in this new docker-compose file...which I want to run some tests to see if any are directly responsible for this now working. For the dhcp container the network line does not have 'host' in quotes and there are some additional options added in the network section (which I do not know what they do...)