Listen here:
A Juneau child care center is set to open in a new location nearly a year after being displaced by flooding. But challenges in finding and preparing the site have left families with few options to fill a monthslong gap in child care.
Glacier Valley Kids, one of about 20 licensed child care providers in Juneau, went through many changes in the past year.
They started when the center – which Carolina Sekona runs out of a house in the Mendenhall Valley – was damaged by last year’s glacial outburst flood. The City and Borough of Juneau then placed the center temporarily in the recently vacated Floyd Dryden Middle School to maintain child care coverage for about a dozen families.
“They wanted me to avoid closure because child care, it’s in crisis right now in Juneau,” she said. “So the idea was to continue to provide care while my home was being renovated.”
But Sekona had to move again this spring, and she couldn’t find a place to go. She gave families 30 days notice that Glacier Valley would close.
Kimmy Lamb was a parent with a child at Glacier Valley. She said 30 days didn’t feel like enough time to figure things out for her youngest son, Liam.
“It was definitely a shock, because we were just getting used to – or Liam was just getting used to – being around other kids, and he really likes Carolina and the other gals, and so it was very stressful,” she said.
Lamb said her parents came back to Juneau from the Philippines in time to step in and provide child care for her son. And Lamb was able to help Sekona find a new, permanent location for Glacier Valley in the Twin Lakes neighborhood. It’s a former private school run by Juneau’s Seventh-day Adventist Church.
Sekona was able to renovate the space with additional help from the church, the city and Southeast Alaska Association for the Education of Young Children, a local nonprofit that supports child care. And she expanded the center’s capacity from 12 children at a time to 30 when it reopens.
Lamb said she’s glad she was able to help Sekona find a new space. But she’s waiting until the end of the year to bring her son back to Glacier Valley Kids in order to save money.
“We’re excited for that,” Lamb said. “I know he’ll probably miss out on the socialization with the kids, but I feel confident that it’ll be still a good time with his grandparents.”
Ashley Anderson, another former Glacier Valley parent, has already been forced to find alternative child care several times. Still, she said this most recent experience was hard on her family.
“We went into panic mode,” she said. “We were kind of freaking out, and, you know, starting to think like,’ oh my gosh, we have bad luck with child care, like, what’s going on?’”
Anderson was able to find another provider, but she said it was hard for her and her child. She said she hopes it’s the last transition for him before he goes to school.
There are some bright spots to the moves. Sekona had to leave the temporary space at Floyd Dryden so a bigger child care venture – with money to renovate the space – could move in. The Central Council of the Tlingit and Haida Tribes of Alaska plans to house four of the tribe’s early education programs there, including the Lingít language immersion program Haa Yoo X̲’atángi Kúdi and Head Start. That will eventually expand child care options in Juneau when they open Aug. 26.
Tlingit and Haida also worked with tribal citizens receiving subsidized care at Glacier Valley Kids to find child care alternatives and added them to enrollment lists for the Floyd Dryden programs.
Meanwhile, Sekona and Glacier Valley have moved back to her old place in the Valley. She can provide child care to four children this month while waiting on a license to operate at the permanent location near Twin lakes. But that state license has become an obstacle – and Sekona is on a deadline. She needs to leave the house before the next outburst flood that’s expected in August.
She said it’s been difficult getting her application processed.
A state task force established by Gov. Mike Dunleavy recommended the state take steps to ease the application process including developing an online application that can track paperwork. But Sekona said she had issues uploading paperwork, and had to email documents directly to a caseworker. And she faced another set of challenges with that.
“I turn all my paperwork to one caseworker, and then days later, I hear that caseworker is no longer there, so I’m transferred to another person,” Sekona said. “And this other person does not know what’s going on, and then I have to resubmit everything that I just submitted to the other worker, and it’s been a nightmare.”
A spokesperson for the Department of Health, which oversees child care licensing, wrote that the department is still improving its system as they receive feedback from providers.
Sekona said the state won’t be able to inspect the permanent space until the first week of August, and she won’t get licensed until September at the earliest. That means families who use child care vouchers that require them to go to licensed providers will have to wait at least another month before they can enroll in Glacier Valley Kids.
But Sekona said she’s ready to fully open again, which is a big deal as child care centers across the state struggle to hire and retain qualified staff.
“Lucky me. I do have all my staff,” she said. “Everybody has their certifications, and everybody’s been through the process and the trainings, and, yeah, we’re all ready.”
In the meantime, Sekona plans to provide care without a license in her new location starting next month. That means she and a coworker can care for only eight children, instead of the 30 she will be able to care for when she gets state approval.
