LEBANON — The city has fresh plans to support the construction of a new child care center, this time on parts of two lots owned by the city and school district on Seminary Hill.
The $4.01 million proposal by the Boys & Girls Club of Central and Northern New Hampshire is to build a 5,400-square-foot child care center next to the current SAU 88 building on Seminary Hill. The facility would have space for 50 children from 6 weeks old through prekindergarten age and about 10 employees, including a center director.
The city has secured a $1.6 million congressionally directed spending allocation, which must be used to fund a child care center by 2032. A desire not to let that money lapse and the need for child care in the Upper Valley are driving the new project.
“There’s a critical need for our community for these services,” Hosmer said. “Really it inhibits economic growth that we don’t have the child care capacity that we definitely need to maximize the number of people in the workforce.”
The Upper Valley has a shortage of about 3,800 available child care slots, according to Amy Brooks, executive director of the Lebanon-based nonprofit Early Care and Education Association. Finding adequate staffing also continues to be an issue for child care providers.
The City Council will decide whether to allow Hosmer to kick off negotiations on the city side at a Wednesday night meeting and voters will decide whether to authorize the School Board to enter into a long-term lease for the project during school elections in March.
The newly proposed project is a pared-down iteration of a plan introduced by former City Manager Shaun Mulholland to build a city-owned child care center in Lebanon.
In 2023, Mulholland proposed a $22 million facility with space for 200 children to be built on city-owned property near the Lebanon Municipal Airport.
That larger proposal proved to be too expensive and “there was no clear way to fund it,” said current City Manager Andrew Hosmer, who took over from Mulholland last summer.
The Boys & Girls Club presented preliminary plans for the new proposal to the City Council and Lebanon School Board in mid-January.
The exact details of the partnership have yet to be ironed out, Hosmer said Tuesday. But early discussions are focused on the city and school district leasing land to the Boys & Girls Club to build, own and operate a new facility next to the SAU building on the Aldrich Avenue side of the Seminary Hill property.
The nonprofit has also proposed that parking and access to the facility would be on city land. The organization proposed building a new playground on fields behind the SAU property next to Civic Memorial Park.
It would be the Concord-based Boys & Girls Club’s first child care center in the Upper Valley. The organization runs after-school programs in Newport and New London, and operates nine other child care facilities around the state.
The Lebanon program would offer market-rate child care, Chris Emond, CEO of the Boys & Girls Club of Central and Northern New Hampshire, said. The cost differs by municipality, but tuition at most Boys & Girls Club facilities around the state ranges from about $300 to $375 per week for an infant.
The nonprofit does not offer scholarships, though it sometimes provides extra support for families in extreme circumstances who do not qualify for income-based state aid.
In addition to approving a long-term lease for use of city property, the city would allocate the $1.6 million in congressionally directed funds to the $4 million project.
As for the rest of the money, Hosmer said he expects the city would work with the Boys & Girls Club to secure grants and other funding. At this point the city has not discussed using tax revenues to fund the project, Hosmer said.
“Certainly the Boys & Girls Club has plenty of expertise in building out facilities like this and they have a very strong network of supporters throughout the state,” Hosmer said. “So certainly we’ll be relying on their expertise and their network to help us put together a stack of funding.”
Besides potentially agreeing to enter a long-term lease with the Boys & Girls Club, the school district does not expect to have any other obligations for the project, Superintendent Amy Allen said Monday. The project would offer an indirect benefit to the district.
“The district could certainly receive some of the broader community benefits of more accessible, affordable child care, such as increased recruitment and retention of highly qualified staff and the potential for more families to move to Lebanon, which would help us continue our upward enrollment trajectory,” Allen said.
The proposed facility would open up less than half a mile from another child care center that serves the same age group, Twin River Children’s Center.
Twin River has been working its way out of staffing struggles for about a year. From the organization’s perspective, another child care center opening up down the road would be a positive, Board of Directors Chairman Craig Babcock said in a Tuesday statement on behalf of the business.
“Organizations like the Boys & Girls Club play an important role in supporting children and families, and efforts to expand access to care are positive for the entire community,” Babcock said. “While staffing is a challenge across the early childhood sector, pairing new capacity with intentional workforce recruitment and training (…) has the potential to strengthen the system as a whole.”
Building out the new child care center’s staff will likely take some time and patience, Emond said.
To meet the staffing challenges, Emond said the nonprofit typically tries to recruit people right out of school. It has also found that there are many child care workers who left the field during the COVID-19 pandemic and are doing other jobs, but might be willing to rejoin the workforce.
“When you hire a good center director and hopefully that person lives in Lebanon and maybe they’ve got connections, they’re not looking to poach people from current centers,” Emond said.
CLARIFICATION: Voters will decide whether to authorize the Lebanon School Board to enter into a long-term lease agreement with the Boys & Girls Club of Central and Northern New Hampshire at school elections in March. What voters will decide was unclear in a previous version of this story.