A 100-year-old Rockford Childcare Center Abruptly Closed. If There's Such a Need for Childcare, Why Can't Centers Stay Open?

April 8, 2025

Original coverage on NPR by Peter Medlin.

In October 2024, former Rockford Day Nursery executive director Jim Peterson went on local TV to promote a new fundraiser.

“We're looking to expand our operations," he said to WIFR. "Currently, we serve about 75 kids, but we’re renovating some rooms, and we're going to expand up to close to 150 kids, so almost double our size.”

But, within a month, the Rockford Day Nursery had abruptly closed down. Those 75 families lost their childcare overnight.

A report from Birth to Five Illinois found that Winnebago & Boone County have over 24,000 kids under 6 years old, but just 10,000 childcare slots to serve them.

So, if there’s such a dire need for childcare, how does a center like Rockford Day shutter out of nowhere? And how has Illinois lost one-third of its childcare providers in the past decade?

Jim Peterson took over at Rockford Day about a year ago. That’s when he says he found out that the center’s finances were in much worse shape than he imagined.

“Pretty early on," he said, "I was like, ‘Tell the board, we're going to run out of money. We're going to run out of money, and we need to start fundraising!’”

That’s why he was on TV. They desperately needed more students to generate more revenue. Rockford Day had been around over 100 years. They had an old building in need of hundreds of thousands of dollars' worth of repairs and a contract with a tenant had fallen through.

“Teachers would come and say, ‘This kid is a problem,’" said Peterson, "and I'm like, ‘We cannot afford to let children go!’”

He says they tried to increase enrollment to cut their deficits, and they did, but they just ran out of money and ran out of time. Unfortunately, Peterson says parents got almost zero notice that the center was closing and that they’d have to find new childcare immediately.

“It was," he said, "a horrible mess."

But Peterson says there are bigger issues with the childcare system that make running centers difficult. Many of Rockford Day’s families relied on Illinois’ Child Care Assistance Program. It's where the state helps low-income families qualify for childcare and reimburses the centers.

Peterson says cuts to that program a decade ago made their business model less sustainable, and it was never fixed.

“The funding reimbursement rates haven't gone up in years," he said, "where staff salaries and costs of food and everything else has risen."

And because they weren’t part of a church, city, or school, they were pretty much solely reliant on those state reimbursements. Those reimbursements can also take weeks to go through, which made operating even more challenging when you're already running on a deficit.

“Right before the end of the year," said Peterson, "we had some money come in, so I was able to get everybody everything that we owed [the staff]. Their paid time off and their W-2s and stuff like that. I'm happy about that."

Meanwhile, Shannon Scheffel walks through brand-new classrooms as construction crews put finishing touches on the building. She’s CEO of the Harlem Community Center.

They just opened up a brand-new childcare center in Machesney Park less than 10 miles from Rockford Day. It's their second center. And, unlike the Rockford Day Nursery, they partner with Head Start, Early Head Start, and a school district.

“We’re opening five classrooms here. That will mean that we'll be caring for a little over 300 children," she said. "I currently have about 45 staff members working at the childcare centers and we will be hiring about 20-25 more staff members.”

But she says it can be hard to hire those high-quality teachers. Scheffel says one reason there’s been an increase in the need for early childcare is because people have recognized how much brain development happens in the first few years of a child's life.

“So," said Scheffel, "that has increased the demand for high quality care for our youngest learners, which increases the education, the skill level, the demands on the workforce that was already existing."

But higher levels of education don’t always equate with much higher pay.

“Even though the state is doing a really good job of trying to increase pay for our teachers," she said, "it still isn't comparable to working in a school district."

Scheffel says they have a lot of staff who leave for school districts to be paraprofessionals and teachers. It’s hard to compete with summers off and union wages when, until recently, they had a tough time competing with McDonald’s salaries.

Gov. J.B. Pritzker's administration has said it wants Illinois to be the No. 1 state in the country for child care. And, despite these issues, she says the state is on the right track towards that goal.

For one, this new center is only possible thanks to an early childhood construction grant through the state’s Rebuild Illinois capital plan.

The state’s Smart Start program has also invested millions in preschool, childcare, and increased scholarship opportunities for early childhood. But, again, Scheffel says, there are still plenty of problems.

"I'm thinking back to the Rockford Day Nursery. While the Rockford Day Nursery thing was a very sudden thing, it was not a very sudden thing," said Scheffel. "When you see problems like that happening at other centers, and you can't help them, that's scary and sad. A lot of us could see that there were problems, and we couldn't really help them."

She says some of the other major issues families face include the availability of childcare for families without transportation or if you don’t work 9-5 weekdays.

“I don't think anybody's open later than 5:45 p.m. in our county, so evening care is really hard to find," she said. "Weekend care is really hard to find [too], and so parents who are kind of working those odd hours, they have difficulty finding childcare to meet their needs.”

Starkeshia Rogers has felt that before. She’s a Rockford parent with four kids, and she’s worked "those odd hours."

“I had to really lean on family and pay them and then, even at times, that was hard because family isn't always reliable," said Rogers. "So. it's like, ‘okay, well, I want to put them in an actual daycare, but a lot of the actual daycares don't cover second shift.’”

She’s dealt with transportation issues too, like trying to coordinate work, school, and childcare with the city bus schedules. It can be really hard, and that’s if you find a center you trust and aren’t put on a waitlist for months. Now with her youngest daughter, she's going in a different direction.

“I just don't feel comfortable putting her in daycares," she said, "because there's so many different aspects of trying to get her transported there in the wintertime, trusting the people and having good communication, and it being accessible, all in one. So, it might be two good things and then there's five bad things that outweigh it."

So, now, she’s leaning on family and helping out with childcare on her own while going to school full time. Rogers says she can’t imagine what it must have been like for those Rockford Day Nursery families who lost their childcare overnight.

“I feel like that was literally a make-or-break moment," said Rogers. "Because not everybody has those support systems, those backup plans. So, I just feel like it was devastating.”

She says those families deserve quality care for their kids. But that can only happen if childcare centers are financially sustainable enough to stay open.