Now, the beginnings of what will become the new Little Peaks center stand at the base of the property, which slopes down from state Route 73 across from the Keene Town Hall. The bones of the building aren’t far from the brook, which flows just behind the center, and a curving dirt drive from the center to the road provides enough of a setback to make Little Peaks feel both in the center of town and part of its own enchanted forest.

As Little Peaks Executive Director Jewett Smith stood with her back to Dart Brook and her face beaming as she looked toward the back of the Little Peaks center on Tuesday, Aug. 9, she dubbed it her favorite view in the world.

Jewett Smith stepped into her role as executive director unintentionally. She just finished her PhD program this year, a parent of two kids in need of more long-term childcare options as she prepares to enter the full-time job market. Her oldest child attended Little Peaks this past year, but the program only ran three hours a day — not enough for her to hold down a full-time job. Full-time childcare with a nanny requires one complete income, Jewett Smith said. On top of that, there wasn’t a local nanny to be found.

As a 36-year-old woman, Jewett Smith said she’s been looking for childcare that will help with her kids’ development and allow both her and her husband to work. But she said that for generations, local women like her haven’t had a comprehensive solution.

“It usually falls on the female to just sort of tap out and say, ‘It’s actually cheaper for me to stay at home than it is to be working and paying for full-time childcare,'” she said.

That’s exactly what she had to do during the peak of the coronavirus pandemic. Jewett Smith and her family moved to the area at the start of the pandemic, and she said balancing professional life and the kids was chaotic. With her daughter attending Little Peaks last year, she started looking for an executive director to build the program up. Even though she’s filled the role for now, she sees herself more as one of the driving forces behind getting the new center up and running. Then, when the center is operating full-time, 50 weeks a year, she’ll be able to seek a full-time job — and the new Little Peaks center will provide that opportunity for other moms.

“I’m sort of more here for this year to get it open, get it licensed, get it staffed, and then put my kids here and sail off into the sunset,” she said with a laugh.

When Little Peaks — which was founded around 30 years ago — opens, it will transform from its current three-hour-a-day facility serving eight kids to being a full-blown, licensed childcare center that could start out by serving up to eight babies up to 18 months old, eight toddlers up to 3 years old, and 15 or 16 preschoolers from 3 to 5 years old. Jewett Reid hopes the new center will open next summer.

There will be an open house at the center at 5 p.m. on Tuesday, Aug. 16 for people who want to see its progress. Jewett Smith said people can park at the town hall.

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Community building

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Little Peaks closed on the piece of land in mid-April, and the building is going up fast. Last week, the site was what Reid Jewett called “a concrete swimming pool.” This week, the exterior walls are up and the interior walls are being framed. The speed of the project’s progress is largely the product of a number of private donations and work from the community.

Not only did private, local donors provide a $750,000 seed fund — which has now grown to $1.4 million — to kickstart the capital project, many of the people who are building Little Peaks are volunteering their time. Jewett Smith said the general contractor is a local who completely volunteered his time for the first year-and-a-half of work. The project’s lawyers and architect are working largely pro bono, too, with several others putting in full-time hours for free. All of these people are putting the work in because they want to give local families the opportunity to live and work here while providing meaningful childcare for their kids.

“We are super lucky to be drawing on seasoned professionals from the area who have skin in the game,” Jewett Smith said. “Like, ‘My grandchildren are going to be raised here; I volunteered at Little Peaks; my grandchildren went here; my kids went here’ — they’re all sort of in on wanting it (Little Peaks) to be here and to be lasting.”

Thanks to these donations, Jewett Smith said the building will be solar-powered and have EV charging stations, have a healthy foods program that sources ingredients from local farms, and have a building filled with completely natural design elements that are chemical-free, plastic-free and safe for kids.

Little Peaks bought the new center’s property from the Housing Assistance Program of Essex County, which still owns an adjoining lot. Jewett Smith said HAPEC is mulling over the possibility of building a few homes there, and the two neighboring projects would address two needs the town of Keene has identified in its recent strategic plan: more childcare and more affordable housing for the community.

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Leveling the playing field

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Now that the Little Peaks building is largely funded, Jewett Smith said her board has shifted its focus to making sure that families of all incomes can send their kids to the center. That’s why they’ve set a goal of building a $3 million dollar endowment fund that would be used to subsidize tuition for low-income families. Part-time Keene Valley resident Annette Merle-Smith provided $500,000 to get the endowment fund going, and Jewett Smith said the Little Peaks board is continuing to raise the funds to give kids from all socioeconomic positions access to the same academic foundations.

Keene has a diverse range of incomes, Jewett Smith said, with an area median income of around $67,500 identified in a 2021 study. Jewett Smith, who has her doctorate in education, said that kids from high-income or college-educated families typically hear around 30 million more words than kids from low-income families by the time they’re 3 years old. She said that if low-income families in the area could bring their kids to Little Peaks by the time they’re 6 months old, that would help to level the playing field.

Jewett Smith noted that many local kids, despite their families’ incomes, will end up attending Keene Central School. She hopes Little Peaks can give all those kids an equal foundation for their future schooling by providing them with healthy food, a connection to place and a strong curriculum. Plus, she said, the capacity of Little Peaks could bring in kids and staff from around the region.

“We want that to be a really robust, cool, well-informed group of kids that have the same basic literacy and numeracy, because that’s just a ‘rising tide’ kind of a situation where all the families — and everyone — are better off in the midst of what will continue to be some pretty dramatic socioeconomic diversity,” she said.

The endowment funding would also give Little Peaks the chance to pay their faculty of at least seven a middle-class wage, which she believes could help counter the “feminized” language that often downplays early childhood education as “just playing with kids.”

“That’s not what professional, high-quality early childhood education is,” she said. “No. It’s not just a bunch of moms doing finger painting.”

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A nature-based safe space

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Jewett Smith said that the Little Peaks board and staff are also thinking about the new curriculum, which she said would be based on the cycles of the natural setting surrounding the center. She credited Little Peaks Preschool Director Katherine Brown as being the “north star” of the environmentally-aligned programming.

Inside the center, the kids will be able to create works of art, ride indoor tricycles and even help out with simple kitchen tasks like dishwashing and mixing up bread doughs. But Jewett Smith said most of the kids’ days would be spent outside.

She envisioned a pollinator and vegetable garden behind the center, with playgrounds for the different age groups that give them the agency to create and build instead of just having a standalone structure. She said there could be trails from the brook to the school and areas for outdoor learning — maybe even a lean-to next to the brook for an outdoor classroom. She said that kids will spend time collecting fall leaves, identifying fern species, and exploring the shallow brook, both when it’s frozen and when it’s flowing.

Jewett Smith said that she came to the property the day after the mass shooting at a school in Uvalde, Texas this past May. She said she was having a “full parental meltdown” imagining dropping her kid off at a school after a tragedy like that. But as she walked among the ferns and took in the mountain view at the center’s new property, she felt peace.

“This couldn’t feel like a safer, happier and cloistered spot to leave a child and know that they’re going to be safe and cared for,” she said.