Lee Buchanan
editor@thefranklinpress.com
Macon County families are facing a critical shortage of affordable, quality child care, but Macon Program for Progress plans to ease the burden by building a new day care facility.
The proposed facility would focus on working families who make too much to qualify for the federal Head Start program but can’t find or afford quality child care.
MPP, which already operates a Head Start child care center for 301 children, has purchased 10 acres along Old Murphy Road for the new facility.
“We serve folks who qualify for Head Start … but we see a lot of folks who do not qualify for our programs but still need child care,” said Chuck Sutton, MPP’s executive director.
Sutton said the lack of child care has a ripple effect on life in Macon County.
“It is overwhelmingly a personal issue, a family issue, but it’s also an economic issue,” he said. “It’s a business issue. It’s important to our community that folks have affordable, available and quality child care.”
MPP bought the property, which is located across the road from the Macon County Board of Education’s central office, from the Franklin Cemetery Association for $275,000.
“They put it on the market, we happened to see the sign and it fit our needs,” Sutton said. “We certainly valued it because it has water and sewer accessibility, which is required for the facility we will build. It’s also fairly close to our present facilities and also convenient for families in the Franklin area.”
There are no official building plans in place for the new facility, but MPP would like to have the facility open within a couple of years.
“We have a dream,” Sutton said. “We know what it takes to run a good child care. We’ve been doing that for 55 years. The next step is hopefully securing some funds to help us design and develop the property.”
The age range will be the same as the Head Start program, 6 weeks to five years old.
“We will target our expansion toward infants and toddlers,” he said. “That’s where the need is in Macon County. We want to make it affordable, particularly for infants, because it costs so much. We would hope to add at least 32 slots for infants and toddlers.”
The need isn’t new, and the demand is greater than ever.
“There are a lot of infants we know that are with caregivers, and it’s not a bad situation,” he said. “It’s just a structured educational environment versus being with an aunt one day, and a grandmother the next.”
The cost of providing quality care is a serious barrier, said Susie McCoy, director of MPP’s Head Start program.
“In child are, it’s very difficult to charge what it really costs to provide quality care,” McCoy said.
“We see a lot of families who have to make the decision whether it’s worth mom going to work, or should she stay home because difference between the cost of child care and what she’s going to earn is minimal,” Sutton said.