The community of Girdwood has one licensed child care facility, and the building is on its last legs. Officials recently broke ground on a new building that will dramatically increase child care capacity in the resort community about 50 miles south of Anchorage.
A construction crew right up the road from the Alyeska Ski Resort paved the way for the new Little Bears Child Care Center on a recent sunny Friday morning. Krystal Hoke, project manager for the Girdwood Child Care Workforce Project, said it’s a major upgrade for the community.
“The current building is only the two classrooms split between the two cubbies,” she said. “This will be seven classrooms with a multi-purpose room.”
Hoke said the resort town has known for decades that more child care was needed, and the old building wasn’t cutting it.
“It was actually referenced in the 1995 Area Plan for Little Bears needing a new building,” Hoke said. “So that's how long it's been needed for. And it became kind of more dire in 2011 when the Municipality nearly condemned the building that they're in.”
In the wider Municipality of Anchorage, finding affordable child care has been increasingly difficult, with rising costs, waitlists that can last a couple years and the loss of a quarter of providers in recent years, according to thread, a child care advocacy nonprofit.
For years, the current Little Bears facility has been able to provide care for between 27 and 29 kids daily. Factoring in part-time care for some kids, the facility serves just over 30 families. And while it has space for toddlers, Little Bears currently doesn’t offer infant care.
“They gotta be 1 and walking to even join our school,” said Little Bears executive director Rachel Byers.
Byers has personally experienced the struggle to find child care in Girdwood. She said the lack of infant care in town led her to get a new job for a while to be close to child care.
“I had no infant care for my oldest, and I had to leave Little Bears my first time working there, and take a job in Anchorage and drive her every single day to Anchorage to work, and then every single night back,” Byers said. “So a lot of times that will happen, or families will leave.”
The new facility will almost quadruple the child care capacity to 112 kids, including two infant care classrooms. Byers said the expansion is coming at a great time, when Girdwood is building more housing. She said families moving in will need child care.
“This building is being built not just to house the students that we have at this very moment, but to house the future of Girdwood,” Byers said.
Hoke, the project manager, said it was a long road to piece together the funding to start building the new facility. She said the project received about $1.6 million in American Rescue Plan Act funds, which required a local fundraising match. Additionally, the project got money from the Rasmuson Foundation, the Forget Me Not Foundation, and a state grant for pediatric development. Even the land the site is built on is a donation; Hoke said they’re leasing it from Alyeska for a dollar a year.
“It was really exciting, because this is really valuable land,” Hoke said. “It was valued over $1 million, just the value for this, and so we're extremely grateful for this acre. It definitely feels like a major donation.”
However, one large chunk of funding is unclear.
Hoke said the project was supposed to receive $980,000 from the federal government. She said the money was allocated by Congress, but it hasn’t been distributed amid the Trump administration pausing and cancelling various grants. Hoke says that money would cover the missing $500,000 the building needs for completion, as well as building a playground.
“Because that has not occurred,” Hoke said, “we are very much in a gray space of not knowing what's going to happen, and so all we can do is continue to fundraise, mostly privately, to see if we can close that gap.”
Hoke said they have about a year to secure the funding. Still, she said, the missing federal money isn’t stopping the project from moving forward.
“There's already so much of it that's ready to go,” Hoke said. “Our design is fully ready. Our building permits are done. You know, equipment is moving on the ground. We can't stop now.”
Hoke said the new, expanded Little Bears facility is on track to open for students by fall 2026.
