Keene is getting its first child care center. Here's why it's a unique win for the community
Aug 08, 2022 —
Keene has no child care centers, and a single, very popular home-based child care provider who always has a waiting list.
Reid Jewett Smith says when she had her second daughter in 2020, her friends and neighbors all told her to get on that list.
"And then there were like, 18 million other people on that list who were all looking for a spot," she says.
Jewett Smith and her husband, Matthew Preston Smith, moved to Keene full-time in 2020. They had a two-year-old, Foster, and a newborn, Hope. Matthew was working full-time as the school cirector at the North Country School in Lake Placid. Reid was finishing up a PhD in education.
"Since moving here, my husband works full-time, I've been in grad school full-time, and we have not been able to find like a single human with a pulse, who's willing to look after kids!"
So for nearly three years now, the couple has been trying to balance work and grad school and their kids, Jewett Smith says.
"We've just sort of been like hustling and grinding to make it work."
Lots of families like ours
Jewett Smith says her family is not in a unique boat, that there are lots of families like hers looking for full-time child care.
What Keene does have is a much beloved half-day preschool program, called Little Peaks. It's been around since 1993, when it was founded by a bunch of local parents. For nearly 30 years, it’s been based out of the Keene Community Center, a white clapboard building that used to be a schoolhouse.
Jewett Smith says she was thrilled when her older daughter, Foster, was old enough to start attending Little Peaks. "It sort of pulled us out of pandemic mode and like back into the community!" she says.
But the preschool program isn't year-round, and it's a half day: three hours in the morning. "And three hours is just not a solution for working parents who are trying to pull off like a two income adult household," says Jewett Smith.
Expanding Little Peaks into a full-day child care center?
Catherine Brown helped start Little Peaks back in 1993, and she's the current director. She says in the last decade, demand for "full-day care" has grown a lot. "Families have changed. There's not usually a parent home to to help take care of the children. During the day, a lot of parents have two jobs outside the home."
Brown says that, naturally, they thought about starting a child care center. But that's a lot more complicated than a preschool.
"To be more than three hours, you have to get licensed by the state. And we looked into that, and this facility [the community center] just wouldn't meet licensing requirements."
They would need to build a whole new building.
But new construction is expensive. And licensed child care centers are notoriously hard to run financially; they don’t make much money. The North Country as a region doesn’t have many child care centers.
The North Country also lost quite a bit of child care capacity over the last few years. The pandemic pushed many providers to retire early, and many daycares and child care centers found it difficult to stay afloat financially.
A community committment and generous donors make it possible
But after several years of planning and fundraising, Little Peaks is expanding from a preschool to a full-day early childhood center.
Construction is underway on a parcel just off Route 73 in the center of town. The new center will serve up to 16 babies and toddlers, and up to 15 preschoolers, which will dramatically expand child care slots on the area.
Keene has a couple things going for it. A couple years back, the town identified child care as a critical need. They've provided resources and money towards the new center, including some of their ARPA (federal COVID-19 stimulus money) funding.
Keene is also a relatively wealthy community, with residents interested in supporting child care. "We've been very fortunate with the generosity in our community," Brown says. Several individuals and families in Keene have made big private donations towards the new building and an operations fund.
Construction underway, a hoped-for 2023 opening
Right in the center of Keene, close to the Keene Arts Center, is the lot where the new Little Peaks will stand. Right now, the site is just a lot of piles of dirt, and a concrete foundation. But it borders Dart Brook, has mountains all around, and a lot of southern light.
"This will be a great place for kids to play," says Brown.
They bought this land from the Housing Assistance Program of Essex County, HAPEC, which plans to build several affordable housing units closer to the road. "So this is great that we'll address housing, workforce housing, and child care in the same place," Brown says.
Their hope is to open in the summer of 2023. That cannot come fast enough, says Brown.
"I've had people calling me for a couple of years now, once they heard that this was in the works. People would call me and say, 'I'm having a baby in January, could I get on your waiting list?' And I'd say, 'Well, we don't have a building yet!'"
But there’s still a long road ahead. And Little Peaks has a new executive director to make it all happen: Reid Jewett Smith, the mother of two. She has a lot of motivation to keep things on track.
"My two-year-old is just at home all the time. I have like real skin in the game here because I, you know, I have this two-year-old like hanging on me at all times! Until we can get the doors open at Little Peaks."
Still fundraising, and the financial puzzle of child care
Smith just finished her PhD in education at Boston College. She’ll oversee the building process, getting licensed, curriculum building. She’s also head of writing grants, and fundraising, which is still critical.
"Right now we have every penny in the bank we need to get this gorgeous building up and running. But then we need to have this $3 million sum that will sit at the Adirondack Foundation, and that will allow us to underwrite ongoing operations and make scholarships available to everybody."
Child care is expensive, and Little Peaks wants to pay its future employees a living wage. They also are committed to need-based scholarships, so that families at all income levels in Keene can access the center. That's really important to both Jewett Smith, and to Brown. They don’t want the center to become exclusive.
"Because it's just so obvious," says Jewett Smith. "There's no point in making this gorgeous building and facility if we can't fill it with all the children that live here … but we need to find a way to fund it long-term. So that's where we are."
A regional solution? Maybe not
The expansion of Little Peaks into a full child care center will mean a lot to Keene and the surrounding area. But financially, it would be pretty hard to replicate in many North Country communities. The expansion of Little Peaks has relied on large financial gifts from its wealthier residents.
So to combat the loss of child care capacity, especially in the last few years, a number of counties - Jefferson, Lewis, St. Lawrence, and Essex - are all investing in programs to incubate and support new home-based child care providers, or individual people who run daycares in their homes. They’re easier to start and cheaper to run.
Still, while Little Peaks might be a bit of a unicorn in the child care landscape of the region, what it boils down to is: the North Country can use every child care slot it can get.
