A new kind of chid care program broke ground on May 18 in Yadkinville. Other communities are drawing inspiration from the model, which will house six small child care businesses under one roof.
After years of fundraising, local collaboration, and state-level advocacy, Mama Jewell’s ChildPlex is scheduled to open in the summer of 2027. It will serve up to 72 young children per shift and will prioritize providing care during nontraditional work hours. The program will be owned by the Yadkin County Economic Development Partnership and managed by Smart Start of Yadkin County.
“It’s more than a building,” said Sandi Scannelli, ChildPlex coordinator with the Economic Development Partnership, at the groundbreaking event. “It’s an investment in children, in working families, and in the future of Yadkin County.”
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Several other communities are hoping to create similar models to expand access to child care, which is hard to come by. Statewide, licensed care has the capacity to serve about 44% of young children who need it, according to estimates from Child Care Trust.
In October 2021, there were 19 children in Yadkin County for every licensed slot, according to a report from the Shallow Ford Foundation, a regional philanthropic fund that originally came up with the concept for the project while working with Business of Child Care, a Minnesota firm.
Even with high tuition rates, child care programs are often unable to make ends meet because of the labor-intensive nature of the business.
The Yadkin County project steps outside of the traditional child care models by hosting multiple child care businesses in one facility. This helps lower start-up and ongoing costs for providers, with equipped facilities and shared services. The model also provides access in rural areas that might not have the numbers of young children necessary to warrant a larger child care center.
“It really checks a lot of boxes for what is challenging in rural communities,” Scannelli said.
Each program within Mama Jewell’s will serve up to 12 children. Local leaders petitioned the state Child Care Commission and successfully changed child care licensing rules in 2023 to allow for multiunit centers. Previously, licensed care was mainly provided in family child care homes (home-based programs) or child care centers.
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The project has raised 71% of the funds required to build the facility, Scannelli said, or about $2.2 million of the needed $3.1 million. Funding has come from foundations, local government, community members, and “those outside the community who see the potential for replication,” she said.
The program will include a resource room for services like speech therapy and a classroom for continuing education and small business training for providers, Scannelli said.
Beyond supporting the in-house providers, the program would also provide opportunities for high school and college students to gain hands-on experience.
Scannelli said she estimates the program owners to earn about $55,000 per year, depending on tuition rates and other factors, and other employees to earn about $16.25 an hour. The average wage for child care teachers in the state was $14.20 in 2024, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The MIT Living Wage Calculator estimates the living wage in Yadkin County to be $19.61 for a single person with no children and $13.75 for a working couple with no children.
Providers will determine their own tuition rates. Scannelli said local leaders are exploring options to make care more affordable for parents like Tri-Share, which splits the cost of child care between multiple entities like employers, parents, and government.
The effort originated out of the needs of Yadkin County’s employers, business leaders shared at the groundbreaking event.
“There are a lot of people that are available to work, but are not able to work right now primarily due to the lack of child care,” said Bobby Todd, president of the Economic Development Partnership.
Businesses are struggling to recruit young talent, said Garrett Dinkins, the county’s economic development director.
“For our existing businesses, this ChildPlex represents workforce stability, a strong talent pipeline, and a proactive community that wants them here, that wants them to stay here and succeed here,” Dinkins said.
Sarah Allen, a parent of a 1 year old and a local nurse, shared at the event that she could not find any child care options in the area. Instead, her mother drives over two hours from Chester, South Carolina, to care for her son.
“There wasn’t anything here in this community,” Allen said.
She hopes her son Lucas will be one of the first to attend a program at Mama Jewell’s.
“You guys don’t know how much this means to a parent in this community to have a healthy and safe environment for my child to grow — it means the world to me,” Allen said.
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