Plans to build a long-discussed child care center in Alburgh are back on the table, more than a year after a legal dispute with the local school district left the project in limbo.
The Alburgh Family Clubhouse has a new proposed location just north of the village center on Missile Base Road. Gina Lewis, president of the clubhouse board of directors, said she is optimistic construction will get underway this summer.
Still, project leaders — who proposed the center in 2016 — need to raise more than $1.5 million to fund a revised facility that is both larger and more complex than in earlier plans. The early childhood education center is slated to serve 62 children, from birth through fifth grade.
“Things are moving — and I’m very excited,” Lewis said in an interview.
The clubhouse directors had planned to build the center on the campus of Alburgh’s K-8 school. But they ended their relationship with the school district early last year, saying that the district was not addressing complications with a construction bid quickly enough. The bid did not meet state Agency of Education requirements for projects located on school grounds, school district officials said at the time.
Both sides were cautious about signing a memorandum of understanding with each other, according to Lewis, and the clubhouse board decided it could build the project faster on its own. She noted that around the same time, the board was approached by a local landowner who offered to donate a piece of land on which the facility could be built.
That deal is currently being finalized, Lewis said.
The clubhouse would be about a quarter-mile from the site of an underground nuclear missile silo built by the U.S. military in the early 1960s. The site, which was shuttered by the end of the decade, is now owned by the Alburgh town government.
Past environmental assessments at the missile site have found chemicals in the soil and groundwater including total petroleum hydrocarbons (TPH), polynuclear aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) and metals, according to a town government memo from 2018. The memo said these past reports found that “contact with these materials may present a low level of risk,” but overall conditions at the site “do not represent a significant risk to human health or the environment.”
A Williston engineering firm conducted an assessment of the clubhouse site in June 2022 and found no threat from hazardous substances, according to the firm’s report.
The missile site “is not considered to present an environmental risk to the (clubhouse) property,” the recent assessment stated, in part because it is located downhill from where the child care center would be built.
Lewis said the project’s board is confident that the site is safe.
With its new proposed location, the project now includes some amenities that the clubhouse board previously was planning to share with the school: a full kitchen, for instance, and a dedicated room for where children could have after-school care. Plans also include a septic system, since the project will no longer be built near a sewer line.
In all, the project is estimated to cost about $2.7 million.
The board lost access to $250,000 in funding tied to the school district when it decided to move locations. But Lewis said it still has about $1 million of federal, state and private funding on hand that members have already raised. The board has applied for more grants, she said, and plans to launch a capital campaign later this year.
Plans are for the child care center to be open and operating by July 2024.
Years after the project was proposed, Lewis added, Alburgh residents continue to face what board members have called a “desperate” need for access to child care.
Lewis often sees posts on the town’s Facebook page, asking if locals have heard about an open slot. Several families who regularly visit the town library, where Lewis works, take their children to child care facilities in neighboring Franklin County, she said.
A 2020 analysis conducted for the board found that Alburgh was “far underserved” by child care options, and many families in the roughly 1,800-person town “are forced to patch together a number of childcare arrangements, work limited hours according to when care is available, or not work at all due to lack of care.”
One challenge the board is working through now, Lewis said, is how to recruit the 19 staff members it expects to need for the new facility. If all goes to plan, she said, the center would be the town’s second-largest employer after the local K-8 school.
“It’s hard to get people out here,” Lewis said of the rural island town.
The school’s pre-K teacher — who taught the only program in town, with 17 students — left that job in February, and the district could not find a replacement to finish out the school year, according to Michael Savage, chair of the Alburgh School Board.
Some families moved their children to a pre-K program at the school in neighboring North Hero, Savage said, but it’s clear that the town needs more local options. He said the district expects to have a teacher hired by the start of the 2023-24 school year.
“There are some privately run programs in Grand Isle, in South Hero,” he said, “but in terms of Alburgh families, that wouldn’t be that accessible for a lot of folks here.”
