Their child care center closed with little notice. Three weeks later, they opened their own.

The crying from the infant room inside this Somersworth child care center made clear: Naptime was over. A teacher rocked one boy in her arms. A parent wiped the nose of another child. Kathleen Collins, the center’s director, cradled 4-month old Harper and walked until her wails stopped.

When Collins settled into a chair in another classroom, she was surrounded by curious 3-year-olds with questions.

“Do her fingers wiggle?”
“Is she a baby?”
“Is she sleeping?”

On the surface, nothing about this scene at Thriving Roots Childcare seems extraordinary. But for families in this community, it represents a leap of faith — a solution devised by parents to fill the gap left by the abrupt closure of their previous child care provider, Little Steps Early Learning Center.

“There were a couple times where things felt rocky, and I was like, my blinders are on. I can’t, I cannot hear it,” said Rebecca Rouse, one of the parents who helped to bring the new child care center to life. “I will not hear anything that says this might not work because it’s going to work. It has to work.”

A tuition spike and broken deal

Parents started to sense trouble last fall, when the owner of Little Steps Early Learning Center increased tuition by 50%. That raised the cost for a preschooler from $315 a week to $475, or $24,700 a year. That’s well above the average, which the New Hampshire Fiscal Policy Institute estimated to be about $14,700 in 2023.

Collins, who led Little Steps for 10 years, was as shocked as the families about the owner’s decision to raise rates.

“No one could or should afford that for childcare,” she said.

Some families left or reduced the number of days they used the center.

More bad news arrived on Jan. 24: The owner of Little Steps told families he was closing the next day. That put the center on a list of nearly 220 others in New Hampshire to shutter since the pandemic, often due to financial challenges.

Little Steps’ parent company, PMC Medical Group, at one time billed itself as a “fast growing, multi-specialty healthcare organization” whose portfolio included a family medicine practice, addiction treatment provider and a pain management center. NHPR reached out to its owner seeking comment on the closure of the childcare center, but he didn’t respond.

At first, the Little Steps families divided the center’s remaining 26 children between four homes and rehired the center’s teachers to care for them. Rouse and her husband, whose 2-year-old daughter had attended Little Steps, took all of the infants into their home.

“My poor husband is working from home, and I’m here at my office, and there are like seven babies in our house,” Rouse said.

Clearly, that wasn’t going to be a long-term solution. But the Little Steps families saw another option. They got to work on a business plan for a new, nonprofit child care center that would be run by a board. They’d use tuition to pay staff salaries. And they’d raise $40,000 to cover the lease and other start up costs.

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Thriving Roots Childcare

But money wasn’t the only obstacle.

When Little Steps first closed, parents reached a deal with the owner to buy its toys, supplies, and furnishings. But at the last minute, families say he hired a crew to toss everything into the dumpster instead.

The parents weren’t deterred. They worked with the landlord and the dumpster company and got permission to claim the items for their new center. Rouse said they even cleared their plan with the local police, just to be safe.

“I’ll tell some of the other parents, decide who you want to play you in a movie, because it just keeps getting weirder,” Rouse said.

Three weeks after Little Steps closed, the families reopened their own center in the same space under a new name: Thriving Roots Childcare. They carried the theme into the classrooms. The infant room belongs to the beets. The oldest children are turnips.

It was ambitious, but Collins, who agreed to stay and run the new center, said she had no doubts.

“I held on because I believed in this community so strongly,” she said.

Navigating financial uncertainty 

Their determination to make this work despite all the obstacles underscores how desperate New Hampshire’s childcare landscape is.

Centers operate on razor thin margins and that will only become more precarious this year, with the end of critical pandemic assistance. And state officials are considering other cuts.

Even for long-standing businesses in this area, the ground feels uncertain.

Cora Hoppe has been executive director of Rochester Child Care Center for the last seven years, and she helped the Thriving Roots parents navigate the challenges of opening their center.

Hoppe has had to navigate them herself. When she faced a $600,000 budget shortfall during the pandemic, she worked with Rochester city officials to secure a $200,000 community development grant. She also cut staff and launched a fundraising campaign.

“We’ll be around 50 years next year, and I still don’t feel safe,” Hoppe said. “I still don’t feel the current climate for any type of business right now is safe, but certainly not for child care in a failing market.”

The parents at Thriving Roots know the economics of child care are against them. But so far, their business plan is working. The board rolled back most of the tuition increase, and most of the Little Steps families who left after the rates increased have returned.

Today, nearly 50 kids attend Thriving Roots. Rouse said the board has thought about making space for more but is hesitant to expand too quickly. Rouse agrees — she’s hoping the center can remain sustainable at its current size, and meet the fundraising goals it needs to stay afloat.

“I mean, certainly we need so much more child care,” Rouse said. “I don’t know if that’s my hill to climb.”