How a Small Town Got Its Child Care Center

In the pre-dawn hours of Dec. 16, a massive haul truck inched into Boulder carrying a 70-foot-long building. Crews steered the structure off Main Street at the L&P Grocery, then down Monroe Street for a few blocks before turning onto West Fourth Avenue and settling, around 6 a.m., behind Boulder Elementary School.

Boulder had its child care center.

The building's midnight run, from the Jim Darcy Elementary School north of Helena, took six hours. Really, though, it capped a yearlong journey that started when a citizen group in Boulder self-formed to investigate ways to fill the city's persistent child-care gap. Their effort crystallized into a distinctive partnership between the city government, Jefferson County, the elementary school, and other entities that, while not yet fully realized, could provide a model for other rural communities.

In 2020, the Bipartisan Policy Center, a think tank in Washington, D.C., set out to measure the gap between families' need for child care and its availability. What they found: The gap in rural areas is significantly higher than in urban communities. In Montana, it calculated, as much as 48.6% of potential child-care need was unmet by existing facilities; in the state's rural areas, that gap was closer to 57%.

The potential economic impact of that gap-including lost wages, business revenue, and taxes-totaled $700 million for Montana's rural communities, the Policy Center estimated, compared to $460 million for urban areas. Those calculations are based on the Census Bureau's American Community Survey and on child care supply data from states and Head Start; they're not exact, but they point to the scale of the challenge.

The need in Boulder has been severe. Its last licensed daycare facility, Frog's Corner Daycare, closed in 2018. When the city's biggest employer, the Montana Developmental Center, closed in 2015, working parents with both the need and the ability to pay for child care went elsewhere. Boulder's population declined and aged as some younger families moved out.

But the demand for child care didn't go away. Teachers at Boulder Elementary and Jefferson High School struggled to find care alternatives for their kids too young for school. Young parents with work in Helena began to settle in the community. "It's been on the radar for quite some time," says Drew Dawson, chair of the Boulder Transition Advisory Council (BTAC). "As we've done needs assessments, and listened to people at meetings, it has come up consistently for two or three years, at least."

The vague concerns became more acute as Boulder and Jefferson County ramped up efforts to attract new employers. Licensed daycare was well established in Whitehall and in the Helena suburbs at the northern end of the county-but its absence in Boulder represented a barrier to economic development there. A University of Montana study linking inadequate child care to lower employee productivity and increased employee recruitment costs "started getting everyone's attention," Dawson notes.

So BTAC spun out a working group, originally chaired by Dawson, to get its arms around the challenge. The group was, by design, broad-based: It eventually included educators, health care professionals, economic development experts, foundation managers, and city and county officials.

The linkage to economic development would prove critical: One of the working group's founding members was Kelly Sullivan, a regional planner with Headwaters RCD, a nonprofit planning outfit that has worked often with Jefferson County and Boulder. Sullivan helped the group apply for a $50,000 grant from Headwaters Foundation (not connected to Headwaters RCD) to support a full-time coordinator-someone who would identify facilities and service providers and also work to ensure that affordable child care was sustained for the long term.

With the Headwaters grant, the working group hired Lindsey Graham, who had taught at a special education program, a Montessori school, a pre-school, and AWARE, a nonprofit serving developmentally disabled children and adults. Graham had moved to Boulder six years ago and had herself encountered challenges finding care for her two daughters.

The working group incorporated as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization, Southwest Montana Youth Partners, so that it could pursue additional grant funding and contract directly with child care providers. It recruited Devyn Ottman, a teacher at Boulder Elementary and a mother of young children, as chair; Dawson and Eric Seidensticker of the Jefferson Local Development Corporation also serve as directors of the new organization.

Then, there was the building. The working group had explored the possibility of providing care at the United Methodist Church's youth hall, according to Dawson. But the hall's capacity was just 12 to 15 children, and the city needed space for 50.

Meantime, Boulder's mayor, Rusty Giulio, had come across an unused structure north of Helena the previous autumn. Then owned by Valley Sand & Gravel in Helena, it had served as a temporary classroom during the construction of Jim Darcy Elementary.

Giulio originally thought he might buy the building for his own account, and move it to Boulder to serve as affordable housing. But by last spring, he had come to see that it could be an ideal venue for child care. He asked Tammy Christofferson, a new provider support specialist at the Bozeman-based nonprofit Child Care Connections, to take a look.

Christofferson thought the two-room building could work. It needed some modifications, she thought: a space for kids to sleep, a separate room for toilet training, and better access for infants and toddlers. But "with minor changes it was a really good option for the Boulder community," she says.

Giulio put down $5,000 of his own money to hold the building until last Aug. 6. The working group had until then to come up with $40,000 to buy the building, about $35,000 to move it to Boulder, and another $30,000 to lay a foundation.

As it happened, the Jefferson County Commission had already allocated $140,000 to support new and existing child care services from the $2.4 million it was set to receive from the American Rescue Plan Act, intended to provide federal aid in response to the COVID crisis. The question: What, exactly, would that money support?

At meetings in July and August, Commissioner Cory Kirsch argued that the potential Boulder facility represented the "perfect opportunity" for the ARPA allocation. Commissioner Bob Mullen resisted, arguing that the funds should serve the entire county, not just Boulder; and that child care there should be privately supported, as it is in other parts of the county.

Ottman and Dawson reasoned that the need in Boulder was especially acute-and that the new nonprofit organization ultimately would support child care offerings across the county. Finally, with three days remaining before the Aug. 6 deadline to buy the building Giulio had identified, the commission voted in favor of a $110,000 allocation to the city.

The city bought the building, and it agreed with Boulder Elementary on a lease that will let the structure sit on school property for $1 per year. For the school, the building held the potential of complementing existing after-school programs at its 21st Century Community Learning Center, allowing it to better serve younger children. The city hasn't decided whether it will retain ownership of the building or lease or otherwise assign it to Southwest Montana Youth Partners, the new entity.

Indeed, the partners still have to work through multiple questions before daycare becomes a reality in Boulder. "We're kind of treading new waters here," Ottman says.

The city also is working through who will do needed construction on the building. And Graham is leading work on a strategic plan that will describe a business model for the new operation; the partners must decide how much they will rely on grants and other external funding sources, and how much they'll charge parents. "Our bias is that we want to ensure that child care is as affordable as possible to parents in the area," she says. "But that's the trick: How do we ensure affordability for parents while making sure there's a center down the road."

Perhaps most challenging, the group must identify and contract with a care provider. The working group is putting together a rubric that will lay out the selection criteria and needed qualifications; most important, Ottman says, is that the provider be state-licensed and that it be willing to work within the terms of future grants that Southwest Montana Youth Partners can secure.

The provider could be an individual, a nonprofit entity, or a for-profit company. Christofferson, from Child Care Connections, says she knows of several providers in the Helena area that have expanded to multiple facilities and could be interested in serving Boulder. "The difficult part right now," she says, "is finding quality help. Those teaching positions and a director in a center environment require higher standards. And we're seeing a shortage of workers everywhere, child care included."

The good news, the partners agree, is that there's a suitable building already in place, attractively situated on the grounds of an elementary school. And Boulder has shown it is a community that wants child care and will work hard to support a provider.

"That says a lot about the community, the love people have for each other and the concern they've shown," Christofferson says. "That passion comes through in all the steps they've taken.

"Boulder is really striking out. If they can make this work, it could be a wonderful model for other rural areas to follow in the future."