When Chelsea Nye’s 15-month-old daughter was born, her mother-in-law came to the Adirondacks to help. She stayed for seven months, watching the baby while Nye and her husband worked. When a new childcare center called Little Peaks opened in Keene, their daughter went to daycare, and the mother-in-law returned to the Midwest.
For Nye and other Adirondack families, Little Peaks has been a godsend. It provides high-quality, reliable childcare at a time when daycare openings are increasingly scarce.
“I’m not sure what we would have done if Little Peaks hadn’t opened,” said Nye, 30, an account manager at Burnham Benefit Advisors, while picking her daughter up from day-care shortly before Thanksgiving. “We were on every wait-list. No one had a spot.”
For a region eager to attract young families to bolster its shrinking and aging population, the diminished supply of childcare is a barrier to growth, right up there with the shortage of affordable housing. The issue has as much to do with economic development as family well-being, spurring some communities to develop innovative solutions to the problem.
Little Peaks drew upon the wealth
