(Courtesy Tom O'Neill and Steve Thurston, 2022)
Tom O'Neill, who closed his It's a Kidz World daycare center last week, says the building was built to be a daycare center, and he hopes to sell the company to another provider, he said. The photo is a before (top) and after image.
Another daycare business has closed. It’s a Kidz World on South Street in Glens Falls closed its doors April 1. The website for the daycare no longer exists.
Tom O’Neill, owner of properties throughout Glens Falls, tells FoothillsBusinessDaily.com that the pandemic and staffing changes were too much for the bottom line of the business.
Like all daycares, his was forced to close during the pandemic. To complicate things, however, the director of the daycare stayed home after maternity leave during the pandemic, and the change of leadership and the loss of income while closed meant that he and his wife drew too much from savings, O’Neill said.
“The loss was too great for us to continue, frankly,” he said.
The daycare had been very successful for 10 years, he said, especially one with an onsite playground. Given all the office space downtown — he cited Monument Square and Glens Falls Hospital as two — “Downtown daycares are notoriously successful.”
Kelly Saunders, who was hired to be the replacement director last June, said the center was shut down too quickly, and left 40 families scrambling.
She said it is hard to run a daycare center in New York, and owners need to be prepared to put money in if they hope to meet all the state regulations and keep staff.
This is a hit to the daycare industry that was already suffering.
“The child care supply was already dwindling before the pandemic began,” said Lynn Sickles, executive director of the Southern Adirondack Child Care Network. She spoke to members of the Adirondack Regional Chamber of Commerce late last month.
Since 2019, Warren and Washington counties have lost 1,179, or 42%, of their child care slots.
"It's a broken system that's not going to get repaired in a short period of time,” Sickles said.
Saunders, echoing Sickles in an interview Monday April 4, said people will apply for the job in daycare assuming they will sit and play with children all day. In reality it is a professional job in early-childhood education that pays only $12 to $14 per hour.
“They can work at the Walmart for $15 or $16 per hour,” she said.
Sickles said the average pay is $29,000 per year, the bottom 2% of all professions.
On top of that, the need has grown during COVID. The pandemic either drove people to divorce, or they stayed together and produced babies, said Melissa Brennan who owns Fresh Beginnings Children’s Academy.
In either case, those infants and toddlers now need daycare.
“The need is huge,” she said during an interview Monday. “Today, we increased by 40% in less than 40 hours.”
Her daycare on Broad Street, less than a mile from It’s a Kidz World, has been open less than two weeks. Many of the new families came from It’s a Kidz World, she said.
Her daycare has room for 97 children and is about 93% full, “but it’s not enough for the need in the area.”
She has another daycare planned to handle 130 children and said she has heard of another that will open soon. She thinks Glens Falls could use at least three more centers, and she is willing to help others build locations and get the training to run them, she said.
“I know that the city needs [daycare],” Tom O’Neill said, adding that his building was built to be a daycare and he hopes to sell the business — toys, tables and all — to a daycare provider.
Warren County has won a $205,000 grant to address child care needs, Liza Ochsendorf told the chamber last month. The money will go toward training for people to learn the rules and regulations of starting a daycare and toward financial and business training.
Ochsendorf is the director of Warren County’s Employment and Training Administration.
Given the intertwined nature of the workforce and the need for child care, the county has started a privately-supported fund for child care support.
Ochsendorf said: "We're getting through this crisis right now…but we know that a private sustainability fund with business donations will help us continue to support child care long term in our community.”