The Growing Place, an early child care center in Durango, is being forced out of its 13-year-old location at the Junction Creek Health & Rehabilitation Center, a nursing home purchased by The Ensign Group in September.
The Growing Place serves 14 families and up to 10 toddlers daily who are being displaced by Ensign’s decision not to continue the lease agreement with the child care center. Amy Eckhart, The Growing Place director, said her lease expires on Dec. 20.
She said it will be months before she can get a new facility licensed, and that’s assuming she rapidly finds a suitable and affordable location to continue operations.
When she broke the news to the families she serves, parents were sad, upset and disappointed. She said some parents cried, realizing they may have to quit their jobs in order to take care of their children. Some parents hugged her. Other parents reached out to real estate agents in search of new locations, and some parents called Ensign for an explanation.
She said families are scrambling to find alternate child care options.
Ensign representatives did not immediately respond to requests for comment, and attempts to reach Ensign’s Junction Creek Health & Rehabilitation Center administrator were not successful.
The Growing Place has a small staff that consists of Eckhart, one full-time child care provider and one substitute provider.
“It’s kind of shocking,” Eckhart said. “The gal that’s with me now has been with me for about 2½ years, and she keeps telling me it’s the best job she’s ever had. And she’s so sad.”
Eckhart’s a seasoned child care professional with a strong reputation and 17 years of experience at The Growing Place. She said she recognizes families she’s served everywhere she goes in town. The children she cared for nearly two decades ago, who she still knows, are now college sophomores.
In tears, she told The Durango Herald that The Growing Place has been a “phenomenal” center for many people, and it shows in text messages and emails of support she’s received from current and former clients.
She said parents have asked her what they can do to help, but a solution isn’t so simple to work out.
“Nothing can happen overnight,” she said. “The licensing rules and regulations with the state of Colorado, with the fire department, with the city of Durango, it is … a huge process, and everything has to be perfect.”
She said Durango and La Plata County, like the rest of the country, is suffering a severe shortage of licensed child care services and families have sat on waitlists with other centers for a year or longer.
“Ensign moved into our small town, without taking any pulse of the community, and promptly removed a well loved, established, high quality child care center without consideration,” she said in a text message to the Herald. “This has left me scrambling trying to find a new, licensable facility, announcing the stressful news to families and a lot of unnecessary personal stress.”
Ensign is a publicly traded company with more than 300 assisted living centers in 14 states.
Brendan Trimboli, one of the parents who has a child enrolled at The Growing Place, said he spoke to an Ensign representative overseeing Colorado operations, who told him when Ensign purchased Junction Creek Health & Rehabilitation Center, it wasn’t aware of the lease agreement with The Growing Place.
Trimboli said he reached out to the representative with the hope they could work out an extension of the child care center’s lease.
He said if Ensign had done its due diligence ahead of purchasing the nursing home, it would have been aware of The Growing Place, which has a fenced-in backyard for outdoor play and is “hard to miss” if one is onsite. Even if a lease extension could not be worked out, at least families who rely on The Growing Place could have had a better head start in finding alternative child care services.
The representative told him Ensign plans to use The Growing Place’s space for assisted living and nursing training, although it isn’t in a hurry to implement the space for that, he said. He was also told the child care center is considered a liability to Ensign. One example of why is that Ensign cannot allow registered sex offenders into the nursing home if a child care center is on site.
“The decision to just … not even consider extending or offering an extension of lease to Amy and The Growing Place doesn’t really take into account the challenges we have as a community to even find child care to begin with, let alone high quality child care like Amy provides,” he said.
Eckhart said when Ensign purchased Junction Creek Health & Rehabilitation Center, she was given the impression her lease wasn’t an issue and it would be business as usual.
Ownership of the Junction Creek Health & Rehabilitation Center has changed hands several times over the years, and she’s always maintained a good relationship with the owners or administrators, she said.
Trimboli said the whole ordeal is bringing unnecessary hardship on parents such as himself and his wife, Laura, who have enrolled their 18-month-old at The Growing Place. Now they need to find a new option for their son’s child care.
His wife has already reduced hours at work in the U.S. Department of Agriculture to care for their son. She can’t reduce her hours any more without their family losing health insurance.
“It would get to a point where she would just be better off quitting the job,” he said. “... We are actually, legitimately faced with that decision.”
Matthew Zepelin is another Durango resident with a child enrolled at The Growing Place. He said his family is happy and grateful for the services Eckhart has provided for his daughter Lily, nearly 2½, who has been at The Growing Place for a little over a year.
“Caring for young children is really a kind of calling for Amy, because she just seems incredibly connected to it,” he said. Intellectually, emotionally, she has a really strong intuition around what’s happening for children.”
He said Eckhart notices when his daughter has learned a new word or something in her life has changed, and she is a “deeply caring, committed person” and she should be treated like the “superstar” she is.
“Learning that the place is closing on very little notice is kind of a shock to the system, and also just leaves us scrambling to figure out a solution,” he said.
cburney@durangoherald.com
