Comunidades necesitadas de cuidado infantil encuentran nueva vida en antiguos edificios escolares

MISSOULA, Mont. — From the outside, the building that was once Cold Springs Elementary School in Missoula, Montana, looks abandoned. Beige paint peels from its cinder-block facade. A blue banner proclaiming “graduation matters” hangs tattered and bleached by the sun. But inside, past a vacant office and around a dimly lit corner, there’s a stack of brand new cots, shoe racks with tiny sandals and the telltale smell of graham crackers.

Five independent child care centers opened here in the spring, the first participants in a unique network called Missoula Child Care Advantage, or MCCA. A sixth center plans to open its doors at Cold Springs in September. When the programs reach full capacity, they’ll serve a combined total of up to 90 kids, infant through pre-school.

Like many communities across the country, Missoula County has a desperate shortage of affordable child care. But Missoulians have found one part of the solution hiding in plain sight: unused public buildings, such as schools closed to accommodate changing enrollments. Cold Springs Elementary was bursting at its nearly 90-year-old seams when it shut its doors in late 2018 and its students moved to a new facility.

Across the country, shuttered schools like Cold Springs Elementary in Missoula, Montana, are being remodeled and repurposed as centers for early child care. Credit: Leah Fabel for The Hechinger ReportCold Springs Elementary closed in 2018, opening up space for the launch of Missoula Child Care Advantage in 2024. But artifacts from the building’s former life serving older kids remain. Credit: Leah Fabel for The Hechinger ReportThe modular classrooms that house the six child care centers were set up in the town of Colstrip, Montana, in the 1960s before being moved to Cold Springs Elementary in the 1980s. They required significant upgrades to meet current child care regulations. Credit: Leah Fabel for The Hechinger Report

As the retrofit projects proceed, new ways of doing the business of child care are emerging, too.

The details of the child care crisis vary by community, but the big picture is the same: Parents are scrambling. More than half of American children under the age of 5 live in a “child care desert,” defined as any census tract where the number of children under 5 is at least triple the number of licensed child care slots. In Montana, the number of slots available meets only 44 percent of total demand, according to the state’s Department of Labor and Industry. For infants, that percentage drops to 32 percent.

Parents Adam Rasmussen and Meredith Repke, who secured one of the initial 42 spots at Cold Springs, are among the lucky ones. For a decade, Missoula offered the couple their ideal lifestyle: mountains within minutes to bike, hike, run, and climb. In late 2022, they welcomed a daughter, Hope. But when it came time for Hope to start in child care a year later, they couldn’t find a single provider with an open slot. At the time, they had been spending a lot of time in Whitefish, a town about 130 miles to the north, due to an illness in the family. When they couldn’t find a child care opening in Missoula, they opted to stay in Whitefish while they continued the search.

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MCCA’s opening felt too good to be true, Repke said. Hope enrolled at Montessori Plus International, whose founder saw the Cold Springs location as a way to expand her popular day care to a second site. Repke and Rasmussen moved back to Missoula, into a new house a short bike ride away from the school. “It allowed us to resume our lives,” Repke said.

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Inside Cold Springs, each of the six MCCA classrooms has been transformed into a unique day care. Through one door, a nature-themed space with fluorescent ceiling lights covered in fabric replicates staring up into a stand of birch trees; through another is Hope’s Montessori-inspired program where children learn to speak in Mandarin.

There are a few hang-ups with the space, said Sally Henkel, who coordinates MCCA under the auspices of the United Way of Missoula County. Due to licensing guidelines written before the network’s inception, children in different child care programs are required to stay strictly apart. This ensures clear accountability if anything goes wrong, said Henkel, who works closely with the county licensor.

Longtime early childhood educator River Yang enjoys her proximity to colleagues at other child care centers in Cold Springs. “There’s a sense of community here,” she said. Credit: Leah Fabel for The Hechinger Report

For most providers in the area, it’s never an issue because they operate alone. But for the co-located providers at Cold Springs, it makes for a strange dance. And for kids who see other kids but aren’t allowed to interact with them, it’s just confusing. “Outdoor time is awkward,” Henkel said.

Still, the space at Cold Springs is a win. Communities need infrastructure devoted to child care much as they need schools, roads, and bridges. But “there’s no dedicated federal funding source to support that,” said Bevin Parker-Cerkez, who leads early childhood work nationwide for the Local Initiatives Support Corporation (LISC), a community development financial institution. As a result, small-scale child care providers often are on their own when it comes to planning for, maintaining, and upgrading facilities, Parker-Cerkez said. And with barely-there profit margins, upgrades typically aren’t in the budget.

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“These are spaces for zero-to-five year olds — they’re getting beat up with wear and tear,” Parker-Cerkez said. “People don’t recognize how much [space] affects the quality of programming. Not just for kids, but for employees, too.”

In Ravalli County, Montana, south of Missoula, Ariella Fabra, right, is creating a child care network modeled on Missoula Child Care Advantage. Credit: Leah Fabel for The Hechinger ReportSeveral years of brainstorming and a quick sprint to secure a state grant led to the opening of Missoula Child Care Advantage, in a school that was closed several years ago. Montana Mama is one of six child care providers to use the space.

Missoula Child Care Advantage coordinator Sally Henkel spends part of each week at Cold Springs checking in with providers and addressing needs that pop up, like maintenance and licensing concerns. Credit: Leah Fabel for The Hechinger Report

Since MCCA’s opening last March, Henkel has fielded calls from child care advocates from other parts of Montana, as well as from Connecticut, Idaho, West Virginia, and Wyoming, all looking to learn more about how the network works. A project based directly on MCCA will launch in the fall in Ravalli County, just south of Missoula.

Missoula is not alone in its approach to expanding child care. Other areas around the country faced with the child care space conundrum have looked at using closed school buildings.

In upstate New York, the 2023 closure of a parochial school led to the creation of the Ticonderoga Community Early Learning Center, set to open in September to 50 children, age 5 and under. In Texas, the United Way of Greater Austin expects to invest more than $18 million over at least two years to transform the shuttered Pease Elementary into a child care center for more than 100 children, ages 6 months to 5 years, as well as community spaces to be used for events like parent classes and continuing education for early childhood educators.

And in Portland, Indiana, 95 miles northeast of Indianapolis, crews are completing renovations on the former Judge Haynes Elementary School, which will reopen in September as the Jay County Early Learning Center, serving 150 kids, ages 6 months to 5 years.

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For years, the community has been clamoring for more child care options, said Doug Inman, executive director of the Portland Foundation. Well over half of the county’s young children in need of care are not enrolled in a known program, and only 9 percent of those in need of care are in a program deemed high quality, based on a 2018 survey. Providers named “building renovations” as one of the top barriers keeping them from seeking a higher rating.

El proyecto Judge Haynes enfrentó un revés en 2021 cuando los líderes del condado optaron por no proporcionar fondos, citando preocupaciones sobre concentrar las plazas de cuidado infantil en la sede del condado en lugar de dispersarlas por toda la región. Sin embargo, la junta de la fundación siguió adelante, según dijo Inman. Compraron Judge Haynes al distrito escolar local por $35,000 y contrataron a un proveedor experimentado con otros tres lugares en Indiana para dirigir el centro. Finalmente, aseguraron alrededor de $4 millones, principalmente de subvenciones estatales y filantrópicas, pero también de miembros de la comunidad como un jubilado de Portland que se presentó en las oficinas de la fundación para prometer $2,500.

Hoy en día, el Centro de Aprendizaje Temprano de Jay County tiene un nuevo techo, pisos, iluminación y baños, una cocina, una sala de lactancia y un gimnasio. Se instalará un patio de juegos apto para niños pequeños a finales de agosto, despejado de “todo ese equipo que te haría necesitar una vacuna antitetánica”, dijo Inman.

“Sabíamos que estábamos dando un paso grande en esto, pero este es un proyecto generacional”, dijo. “Si podemos ser un modelo para cualquier comunidad pequeña para mostrar que una comunidad de 20,000 personas puede hacer esto, nos encantaría ser un lugar del que otros puedan aprender.”

Esta historia sobre edificios de cuidado infantil fue producida por The Hechinger Report, una organización de noticias independiente y sin fines de lucro centrada en la desigualdad y la innovación en la educación. Regístrese para recibir el boletín informativo de Hechinger.