Antigo Child Care to reopen
Earlier this week, Abby Arrowood, the new owner of Antigo Child Care, announced her center will reopen Nov. 4.
The announcement has no doubt been welcome news for many local parents.
Since Antigo Child Care temporarily shut down around the beginning of summer after the old owner left and Arrowood began going through state licensing and certification processes to take her place, she said the void impacted around forty families that had depended on the daycare.
“A lot of families don’t have grandparents or family members to watch their own children, so they were forced to go to Peace or Leroyer, and Peace and Leroyer got very full very quickly and then that still left a lot of parents without finding childcare, so then they spread out to family childcare and doing in-home childcare with other parents in the area,” Arrowood said. “But they also fill up pretty quickly, so everyone just had to kind of scatter around and it really left a lot of parents to struggle to find someone to watch their kids so that they could go to work. So it definitely felt like a really long time for parents I imagine during the close.”
Angie Close, the Executive Director of the Langlade County Economic Development Corporation (LCEDC) which also helps lead a task force dedicated to bolstering child care options in the county, called Antigo Child Care’s return “a positive step forward.”
“With the Antigo Child Care Center reopening, Langlade County will have a total of four group childcare centers that at full capacity offer 213 childcare slots,” said Close, who said the number, provided by a resource agency called Childcare Inc., does not include certified or licensed family child care providers. “The shortage of quality childcare options remains a pressing issue, especially for families seeking flexible hours and specialized care, such as infant and toddler programs. Additionally, many local providers continue to face barriers like staffing shortages, high operational costs, and meeting regulatory requirements.”
Arrowood said she had known the licensing and certification processes would take a considerable amount of time, but that they still took a few weeks beyond what she had expected and delayed the reopening. She nevertheless called the process, which she said entailed checking whether the day care was up to Department of Children and Families (DCF) codes, “a good experience.”
“They want to just make sure that you have every little thing that involves all the background checks necessary: revising a handbook for everyone, making sure that you have insurance for the center, testing, like radon testing and all of that, and then just the little things like getting together those emergency phone numbers and fire drills and tornado drills,” she said. “The handbook was definitely one of the longer ones just because you want to make sure that your handbook is the center, the backbone of the center essentially.”
Antigo Child Care accepts children from six months to five years old, and as of Wednesday, Arrowood said around 28 of the center’s 45 openings had been filled, some by the same children who had been enrolled there last spring.
“I had quite a few families returning — maybe a little bit over half,” Arrowood said. “And some of those families were even families that were on the waitlist with Gabby Sorano, during her ownership. She was at full capacity and some parents from a year or two ago are still waiting for childcare, so I went ahead and enrolled them right away just because they’ve been waiting so long for that childcare. So a lot of them are returning parents, and then some of them were just ones that were stuck on that waiting list from before.”
Sam Zupon, director of Leroyer Child Care, said a few families did bring their kids there after Antigo Child Care closed its doors this summer.
“Maybe five kids came additionally when they closed,” Zupon said. “At that time, I also had an in-home and I had two kids that were at Antigo Child Care at my home. But it wasn’t an overwhelming amount. I think the summer played into that because they had a lot of teacher staff kids there, so then they were also off for the summer, so it kind of worked for their closing time that those parents were home.”
Zupon suggested the LCEDC task force, which most Antigo daycares are part of and is known as Dream Up!, has helped improve child care availability for local families in a number of ways.
“Instead of it being competition, we do collaborate and work together,” Zupon said. “We know where we can refer people if we’re full for a certain age group. It’s kind of a unique thing that we do all work together like that. I even asked for ideas on different playground materials and things like that, and we kind of bounce ideas off each other.”
According to Close, maintaining quality child care options is crucial to the community’s overall well-being.
“Quality and affordable child care enables parents to participate fully in the workforce, which strengthens the local economy and supports business growth,” she said. “When families have affordable and reliable, accessible childcare, it reduces stress and improves work-life balance, leading to healthier, more productive employees. Additionally, early childhood education provided by these facilities is key to children’s development, helping to lay a strong foundation for future success. Ensuring adequate childcare options is essential not only for supporting families but also for building a thriving, sustainable community.”
To contact Antigo Child Care about openings, call 715-627-0811 or email Arrowood at ms.abby@antigochildcarecenter.com.
Source: Antigo Daily Journal October 25, 2024 issue