Montgomery County’s changing demographics have child care providers from Silver Spring to Damascus expanding their services and filling their waiting lists.
When Angelica Pena opened Silver Spring’s Kreative Kidz in September, it only took her until November to reach capacity. Now, she’s preparing to open two more classes for 3- and 4-year-olds by the summer and double her enrollment to 106 children.
“We started small but grew much faster than expected,” Pena said. “A lot of parents were surprised I had any openings — they say there are definitely a lack of child care centers in the area.”
Births in the county have grown steadily over the past decade, reaching a 16-year high of 13,806 newborns in 2006, up from 11,812 in 1997.
While child care providers expand along with the influx, school officials brace for coming years of increasingly restrictive budgets. A new round of projections released last week by the district’s planning division expects elementary enrollment to grow to 60,619 by 2013, a more than 7 percent increase from 56,432 in 2007.
On the same day, Superintendent Jerry Weast issued a memo to the Board of Education warning that expected funds to increase school capacity might be delayed until 2012.
More than ever, the board is concerned with early child care to ensure that expanding classroom rosters — a growing number of whom do not speak English as their first language — are filled with students prepared to be there.
School board President Nancy Navarro said she spoke with Del. Tom Hucker, D-Montgomery, about the need for a cohesive strategy at the local and state level to address prekindergarten services.
The lowest-income areas in the county, Navarro said, are the areas with the fewest available licensed child care slots.
“It’s an indicator kids are being cared for in unregulated care,” Navarro said.
In the county’s rapidly growing northern reaches, Diana Merritt’s day care has a waiting list for the first time in three years of business. Business was calm for the first few years, she said, “but since I returned from having my own child, I was totally booked in two months, and people are still calling.”
