The Valdez City Council chose its City School Administrative Building as the location for a new child care center during a meeting last month, in one of the latest attempts to make child care more accessible in the Prince William Sound area.
The selection passed on Feb. 4 with five present council members voting for the selection, and two absent.
The administrative building is located next to the Hermon Hutchens Elementary campus. The previous studies actually looked at the school as a possibility for a child care center, but the administrative building was chosen instead after discussion with the school board and school staff.
A city of Valdez memo stated that utilizing the administrative building would be less expensive than renovating a wing of the elementary school. The memo also said the new proposal would be much less disruptive and be better for traffic flow. One of the downsides is that the administrative building is slightly smaller.
Jason Weber, the Valdez City School District Superintendent, said during the meeting that he liked the plan to use the administrative building more than the previous one.
“It’s ultimately a good compromise,” he said.
The city of Valdez previously contracted with the Stellar Group in 2022 to conduct an Early Childhood Needs Assessment. The assessment identified Valdez as a “child care desert,” and led the Valdez City Council to establish a Child Care Crisis Task Force at the beginning of 2023. The selection of a site for a child care center was among the task force’s top priorities to establish and maintain licensed child care.
Elise Sorum-Birk, the Valdez deputy city clerk, said in an interview that other focuses of the task force included workforce development for the early childhood sector and building a sustainable funding model. And while building a child care facility is a top priority, so is helping people who are currently providing unlicensed child care become licensed.
“We need care in our community that’s all different types and kinds of care,” Birk said. “Not all families are going to want to have their child in a center. Some families probably prefer in-home care. So you want to have a good, solid ecosystem of care in your community.”
Making child care more accessible has not only been an ongoing process in Valdez, but also in Cordova.
Cordova previously had a city-run day camp out of the Bidarki Recreation Center during the summer. But the closure of that program left parents stringing together a variety of patchwork of activities for summer child care. And the city currently only has one licensed daycare center that provides care for infants.
Meanwhile back in Valdez, Sorum-Birk said design work on the new site would continue, and that an operator for the child care center would be chosen within the next month. The city will continue to own and pay utilities on the administrative building, she said, and the chosen operator will benefit from being able to rent a building that was purposely designed for child care.
“One of the biggest challenges former operators in our community had was with paying rent for a facility,” said Sorum-Birk. “This is a way that we [the city] can contribute to solving the problem without being the ones actively operating the facility. And I think it’s kind of a win-win for our community.”
She expects construction on the new Valdez child care facility to begin in 2026.
