Last May, the North Elba Town Council asked the Lake Placid/North Elba Development Commission to explore the state of and demand for child care in the community. The result was the 22-question Community Childcare Survey, which will be active through the end of March.

Town Councilor Emily Kilburn Politi said the town council recognized a local demand for child care and wanted to explore the issue further.

“There’s this real demand for child care and it’s something that the town could potentially do an initiative on, with the understanding that it would be something like a public-private partnership,” she said. “We’re just being a facilitator of the conversation.”

Some of the data the survey gathers includes the number and ages of the respondent’s children, if the respondent has had trouble finding day care in the North Elba area and how much the respondent pays for child care. Kilburn Politi said that other questions were formulated to gather data about how child care affects the local workforce.

“We were advised by a couple of communities that have recently gone through this (to ask) … ‘Have you missed work due to a child care issue unrelated to your child being sick? If you’re only working part-time, would you work full-time if you had reliable and affordable child care?'” she said. “We want to see what the need and the demand is for child care and also try to see if we capture some stuff that employers might be interested in about people missing work or not being able to work as much as they’d like.”

Kilburn Politi said that, if local employers also become invested in the conversation, it is more likely that they will help work with respondents and the town council to solve the problem of limited child care.

North Elba’s survey was based in part on a child care survey that the Ticonderoga Revitalization Alliance in the town of Ticonderoga, on the other side of Essex County, completed in 2022. The Ti Alliance is a non-Local Development Corporation focused on economic development in the Ticonderoga area.

After completing their survey, the Ti Alliance released a report containing the survey’s findings. That can be viewed at tinyurl.com/yc2hn5yt. The organization then identified a facility for a new child care center, developed construction and business plans and fundraised for the project. Work on the new child care center, located in the former St. Mary’s School in Ticonderoga, began last November.

Kilburn Politi said that North Elba’s next steps depend on the data that the town council receives.

“We’ll see what the data says,” she said. “One thing that we do think the survey will show … is that the need really is for the younger subsets, so birth to 3-ish.”

While preparing for the survey, Kilburn Politi said that the town council reached out to existing child care providers in the area — from larger child care centers to in-home care providers — to gather their input on the business end of the problem.

“Everyone was under the agreement from talking to all these groups (that) the need is birth to 3 to 4 because, once you hit 4, you have universal pre-K,” she said. “The (child care providers) that do serve that (birth to 3) group are at capacity and have a waitlist.”

Lake Placid Central School District partners with St. Agnes School, a private Catholic school, to offer full-day universal pre-K to all 4-year-olds in Lake Placid. St. Agnes School had 52 pre-K students total as of last September. Saranac Lake Central School District has a similar universal pre-K program with Kids R Us Early Learning Center in Saranac Lake.

Kilburn Politi said that the goal of the survey is not to close any existing child care centers, but rather help them optimize their services to the needs of the community.

“We talked to them all. We’ve covered our bases and we’re not trying to scare anyone. They’re all providing such a needed service,” she said. “We’re not trying to put (them) out of business, we’re just trying to figure out if we’re serving our populations correctly.”

If the survey shows the expected child care demand for the birth to 3 demographic, Kilburn Politi said that the town would ideally then establish a public-private partnership similar to Ticonderoga’s, helping an existing organization expand its offerings or facility.

“We’re actively still wondering if there’s an existing organization that we could partner with to develop their program,” she said. “If there’s an existing either in-home care provider or an existing center, we would love to be a part of it, to have a bigger facility, to be able to accommodate more birth to (3-year-olds).”

To take the anonymous North Elba Community Childcare Survey, visit tinyurl.com/2wn6x2rk or pick up a paper copy at the town clerk’s office in the North Elba Town Hall.