With a wave of retirements in child care leadership, Summit County centers are entering a new era as providers look to grow and maintain quality care while grappling with a 600-child waitlist.

Several longstanding center and program directors are stepping down in a matter of weeks, including Carriage House executive director Martha Meier, Timberline Learning Center executive director Leslie Davis and Early Childhood Options executive director Lucinda Burns. Other leadership changes include Lake Dillon and Summit County preschools. 

Peers in the community said, while bittersweet, the departures are indicative of how far efforts to expand child care to working families have come. Each director leaves behind decades of experience that has strengthened the child care community across the county, they said. 

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“Martha, Leslie and Lucinda have been pioneers for child care in the county for so long,” said Breckenridge Housing Program Manager Corrie Burr, who’s helped lead child care efforts in the town. “It’s a poignant time for child care in Summit County.” 

Laurie Best, Breckenridge’s planning manager for housing and child care programs, said while providers still face major hurdles, the outgoing directors’ leadership skills helped build a network for families in need. 

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“They were willing to say, ‘Let’s work together because that’s the only way we’re going to succeed at making changes that are impactful to the community,'” Best said. 

The departures come at a potentially transformational moment for child care initiatives. This year, local officials rolled out countywide tuition assistance programs for low- and middle-income families with children aged zero to 5. Two new centers, one in Silverthorne and the other in Copper Mountain, are slated to bring more than 100 new slots for children by early next year. And organizations are quickly filling leadership roles with some eyeing expansions of their centers. 

But challenges remain. 

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The waitlist for children in the county is still hovering around 600, a number that has held for more than two years, said Burns, the childhood options director. Also, by the beginning of the school year, four in-home providers will be ending their services, putting more pressure on centers to fill the gap, Burns said. 

Yet, as Burns prepares to leave her organization after more than 20 years, she is feeling confident. 

“I feel extremely optimistic about the state of things,” she said. “I can see that we’ve had a long string of leaders in place who are leaving strongly supported, well-run centers for new leaders to step into.” 

‘Monumental’ retirements 

Meier, the outgoing Carriage House executive director, has served with the center for nearly 40 years. She began as a teacher in 1984, back when Carriage House was a preschool only serving 3- to 5-year-olds and was housed in the basement of Breckenridge’s Father Dyer Church. 

It’s a “monumental retirement,” said James Cummons, Carriage House’s board president. 

“She’s been such a great pillar of support for the community,” he said. “We really celebrate (her), but are sad to see her go.”  

Carriage House’s assistant director, Jen Nichols, is set to succeed Meier in late August. 

“I wouldn’t be stepping down if we didn’t have a good succession plan in place,” Meier said. “New blood, change — it feels good.” 

Meier saw the evolution of Carriage House from a basement preschool to a full-fledged center with its own space dedicated for infants to 5-year-olds. One of its greatest challenges, Meier said, was the pandemic, which caused a mass exodus from the industry nationwide, according to a federal report. 

“After COVID, we just had such a hard time hiring people,” Meier said. “But now, we’re fully staffed.” 

Much of that is credited to significant pay increases the center made last year. According to Cummons, starting pay for a teacher is between $24 and $27 per hour, a roughly 15% increase, he said. 

Davis, the outgoing director of Timberline in Breckenridge, said this too was a key priority for her in recent years. The center’s base pay is now $24 per hour, up from about $18, Davis said. 

“It’s still hard,” she said. “The cost of living in Summit County, the cost of living in Breckenridge, is astronomical.”

Davis feels the pay boost has made a difference for retention, adding, “I think it transitioned it from a job … to, ‘I can create a life here.” 

Davis said she is stepping down for personal reasons. Her son no longer lives in the county after graduating college, and she is also looking to move elsewhere. Davis has served as Timberline’s executive director since its inception nearly 15 years ago. 

“Timberline has really been my third child,” Davis said, “and I believe so deeply in the work that we do there. It’s magical, magical work.” 

Austyn Dineen, Timberline’s board director, said the center is currently searching for a successor to Davis and is hoping to make a decision sometime in September. 

Dineen called Davis a “cheerleader for early childhood.”

“To have her all these years has been incredible,” she added. “She has created a center and an atmosphere that lives up to the standards that centers should set.” 

A ‘fundamental shift’ for child care

Best, the Breckenridge housing and child care manager, said she remembers a time when child care in the town was in a much more desperate state. 

In the early 2000s, child care centers struggled with revenue. As centers sought income to pay staff and maintain facilities, those costs were passed on to parents who had to contend with “completely unaffordable” tuition, Best said. 

“Financially, things were in pretty poor shape,” she said. 

In 2007, the town implemented a subsidy program to help low- and middle-income families afford child care and preschool, which represented a “fundamental shift” for providers, Best said.

With subsidies from the town, centers were able to hire and retain more staff and update facilities, Best said. 

Today, Timberline and Carriage House, for example, are “fully sustainable” organizations with buildings that are in “great shape,” said Burr, the town’s housing program manager. 

Breckenridge’s subsidy program served as a framework for what eventually became Summit First Steps and Summit PreK, which provides financial assistance for children between the ages of 0-3 and 3-5, respectively. SummitPreK launched in 2019 using money from the voter-approved Strong Futures Fund, and First Steps went into effect this year and represents a coalition between the county and local town governments. 

That’s in addition to Colorado’s universal preschool law, which will provide between 15-30 free hours of preschool per week for 4-year-olds and 10 hours for qualifying 3-year-olds. That program is set to go into effect this fall. 

“We’re really on the cutting edge of something spectacular,” Davis said of the county’s subsidy programs. “It’s something unheard of in other counties in Colorado. Everyone is banding together.” 

Along with the expansion of subsidies, centers are also eyeing growth to accommodate demand. Timberline is looking to add a new classroom as part of an expansion next year while Mountain Top Explorium, also located in Breckenridge, continues to search for a permanent space. 

Mountain Top, which offers a children’s museum as well as after-school and summer programs, has been without a true home since 2019, when it was forced to vacate its space in the Village Hotel in Breckenridge after the building was sold by Vail Resorts. 

The museum is currently housed in a space underneath the River Mountain Lodge nextdoor to the Castaways Cove restaurant and tiki bar along the Blue River Bikeway. The museum, which has been operating for 18 years, remains open each day of the week but in a far smaller space, said Board President Del Deocampo.

But Deocampo has reason to be optimistic about its future, she said, after hiring Mountain Top’s new executive director, Dave Miller. Miller, who previously served with the Keystone Science School, will help Mountain Top “be sustainable and grow,” Deocampo said. 

Miller succeeds former executive director Tiernan Gannon, who is now leading the new Wildflower Nature School, an 8,800-square-foot center in Silverthorne that is aiming to open in September. 

Deocampo said the movement in leadership from each center shows the strong pool of child care leaders the county has fostered. 

“As there’s a lot of leadership changes, I’ll be interested to see how we can all work together,” she said. “The one thing that all of these organizations have in common is nobody’s doing the exact same things.”

‘We’re going to continue thriving’ 

Gannon said it’s an exciting time for child care leadership in the county.

“These center directors who are moving on have paved the way for these young leaders,” she added.

The Wildflower center, Gannon said, represents “a dream of mine that’s been kind of in the works for the last decade.”

The center aims to employ nature-based learning that can include anything from watching the weather and changes in the environment to physically interacting with elements of the outside world. Research shows integrating nature in early childhood development can be linked to better academic performance and overall wellbeing for children, Gannon said.

“Nature is a studio. It’s a tool. It’s inspiration,” said Gannon, who sees the “outdoors of an extension of the classroom.”

The center will be the first of its kind in the northern part of the county and could serve around 70 children. But it is already facing the task of fielding the county’s high demand. Gannon said about 275 children are already on a waitlist ahead of the center’s opening.

Still, Gannon said, “With the opening of this center, it’s going to make a greater dent than we think.”

She hopes it will bring child care to Silverthorne families who’ve found themselves having to commute elsewhere in the county for services.

And, with the impending opening of another center in Copper Mountain, which could bring more than 40 slots, the county is filling critical care gaps.

But while the county sees an increase in larger centers, it continues to lose in-home options. 

When Burns, the childhood options director, began working for the organization nearly 24 years ago, there were 45 in-home providers. With the loss of four this year, the county is down to just 10, Burns said. 

“In-home care has always been a great option for families,” Burns said. “Unfortunately, for the in-home provider, it’s really challenging to run child care in your own home.”

With record-high housing prices, many home care providers cannot afford to stay in the county. Those that stay in operation have to contend with long hours and low pay since in-home care has historically been a less expensive option for families, Burns said. 

For larger centers, maintaining adequate pay will play a large role in whittling down the current waitlist, a majority of which consists of infants, Burns said. State regulations mandate there must be one teacher for every three infants in a program — a far smaller ratio than for children of older ages. 

But a center’s desire to bolster staff must also be balanced with the impacts on families as future pay increases are likely to stem from tuition hikes. 

“Each child care center needs to bring in enough money per child to pay their teachers not only a livable wage but an honorable wage,” Burns said. “These are professional positions, and they need to be paid a professional salary.”

It’s why continuing to subsidize families will be crucial to ensure they don’t shoulder too much of the cost, Burns said. 

The cost for infant and toddler care, covering children from 6 weeks to 2 years old, can be $90 a day or about $2,000 a month without a subsidy. For preschool, which encompasses children usually around the ages of 3 and 4, the cost can be about $1,500 a month. 

“I really view child care as a public good and part of infrastructure, like roads — something we have to have and it benefits all of us,” she said. 

Child care leaders, both current and outgoing, agreed. And they believe local governments, with the support of residents, will continue to see it as both an investment in children and the local economy. 

“We are going to have staffing shortages if we have parents who are forced to stay home because they can’t pursue careers due to a lack of child care,” said Cummons, the Carriage House board president. 

Davis, the outgoing Timberline director, said, “I think that optimism is not just aspirational. It’s based on concrete initiatives that have been taken.” 

“I think we’re on the precipice of bringing on these new and innovative thinkers,” she said. “I think that we’re going to continue thriving.”