A Central Oregon childcare center that closed abruptly in July will soon open its doors to children once more.
Oregon State University-Cascades announced Tuesday that it will partner with local nonprofit NeighborImpact to provide 33 Head Start childcare slots for children five and younger, starting Sept. 8.
The Bend-based public university shocked the Central Oregon and childcare community when it announced the closure of it’s state-of-the art childcare center, Little Kits, in May.
At the time, officials blamed “ongoing financial challenges” for the program’s failure.
Christine Pollard, interim chancellor and dean for OSU-Cascades, said fall enrollment numbers at OSU were declining last year. By early spring, budget realities were bringing more pressure, said Laurie Hill, OSU-Cascades chief business officer.
Officials at the campus started looking for options beyond Little Kits in early spring.
“OSU-Cascades is committed to ensuring that the OSU childcare building serves its intended purpose of helping solve the childcare crisis in Central Oregon,” Pollard said. “We’re proud to partner with NeighborImpact as a first step in this important effort.”
Hill told reporters on Tuesday that NeighborImpact had been in talks with the school in an advisory capacity for the past 14 months, as the financial picture at Little Kits became clear. However, Hill and Cooper insisted that no plans to lease a portion of the building to Neighbor Impact were finalized until recently.
Traditionally, Head Start is a program for low-income families, but Cooper said the program will provide a percentage of slots to families with higher incomes, too.
OSU-Cascades will charge NeighborImpact $1,772 per month for roughly 2,600 square feet of the former Little Kits space, Cooper said.
Hill called the below-market rate a community good lease.
The college hopes to lease the remainder of the space to another childcare provider, Pollard said, but that won’t likely happen until early 2027. The college won’t hold a public request for proposals to choose the new provider because the school is renting the space using a community good lease, Hill said.
The new program will continue to work with student interns, said Scott Cooper, NeighborImpact’s executive director. In addition, 10 teachers will join the program and will be paid between $21 and $40 per hour.
“It’s certainly competitive within the industry. We try and peg wages to the first-year kindergarten salary in Portland Public Schools,” Cooper said.
Lead teachers at Little Kits earned about $58,000 a year according to reports published on OSU’s website.
“Unfortunately, here in Oregon and across the country, childcare remains an extremely challenging model to sustain and subsidize financially, with rising operating costs and limited public funding,” then-Interim Chancellor and Dean Becky Johnson wrote in a May letter to parents about the situation at Little Kits before that childcare program closed.
This story comes to you from the Northwest News Network, a collaboration between public media organizations in Oregon and Washington.