On a recent morning, Christin Shapiro raced to get her one-year-old son Jori out the door to his day care. He bobbed in his high chair and made tiny animal noises as Shapiro sliced rolled-up bread and peanut butter into bite-sized pieces for his breakfast.

This dash to day care was their routine for months, but now Shapiro — and 21 other families like hers — are picking up the pieces after Oregon State University-Cascades abruptly closed its Little Kits day care center. The center, a novel experiment in the region that opened to fanfare just a year ago, closed Thursday with little explanation.

“It’s not only just failing families who needed it, it’s failing kids, and now we’re scattering to the wind,” Shapiro said.

Little Kits’ sudden closure is a blow in a Central Oregon city already struggling with a day care shortage. The facility, built specifically by OSU-Cascades, had a dual purpose: it provided much-needed day care slots but was also a training ground for future providers as part of the university’s Early Childhood Education degree program.

After weeks of searching, Shapiro was able to find child care for Jori just weeks before Little Kits’ last day. She’s happy she found a new spot, but it’s not the teaching facility she wanted for her son’s growth and development, or the community she came to love.

Some families are still struggling to find day care options for their children — no small feat in a region where waitlists can top two years and a spot can cost more than in-state college tuition, said Amy Howell, Central Oregon Community College’s early childhood education program director.

“I think the wait lists speak to the crisis mentality. I think that is absolutely one of the biggest needs that we have — infant and toddler care,” Howell said.

An experiment for the future

The OSU-Cascades day care center was intended to be a regional gold standard for early childhood education and play a key role in addressing the lack of infant care options in the region by training would-be providers.

State and local elected officials lined up to help find funding for the center, including $3.3 million in federal funds. OSU-Cascades ran the facility, unlike many day cares that are operated by private providers or companies.

Parents have pressed OSU-Cascades for answers, but much is still unknown about what led to the program’s downfall beyond “ongoing financial challenges,” according to a statement provided on the facility’s website. Oregon State University staff and administrators declined OPB’s multiple interview requests. Day care employees also did not respond to interview requests.

Despite charging high tuition and working with state childcare subsidy programs like Employment Related Day care and Baby Promise, the center didn’t bring in enough money to cover the livable wages and benefits some Little Kits staffers were earning. Shapiro, for example, paid more than $2,300 for full-time infant care for her son with no subsidies.

OSU is hoping to rent its purpose-built center to an independent day care provider, copying a model set by the nearby Central Oregon Community College at its Madras campus, but even that isn’t bulletproof, as the private program renting the space is set to raise its rates this fall.

Central Oregon, like much of the state, is an infant care desert according to recent OSU research, and availability for toddler care is marginally better. In Central Oregon, there are 6,583 licensed childcare slots and 202 facilities, according to the Oregon Department of Early Learning and Care.

Nationally, childcare is in crisis and worsening due to loss of federal funding, according to a 2024 survey conducted by the National Association for the Education of Young Children, or NAEYC, a professional membership organization that advocates for early childhood educators and policy.

“Program costs are rising, staff burnout and turnover remains high as wages remain too low, and already stretched families are having to pay more for the care they need,” the center said in its report.

Staffing, for the most part, is at the heart of the childcare crisis.

Happy teachers, happy kids

In a region with a dearth of child care providers, Little Kits was supposed to be a solution.

The highly anticipated center was not just a day care, but also an incubator lab for students pursuing early childhood education degrees at OSU-Cascades and Central Oregon Community College. Future providers received top-notch experience while also providing new day care slots.

Children at the facility had consistent teachers with above-average salaries and benefits, unlike many Central Oregon day care centers, where employees make an average of $36,500 in 2025 dollars, according to Oregon Employment Department data.

Lead teachers at Little Kits earned about $58,000 a year — over 60% more than the regional and state average, according to reports published on OSU’s website. It’s a model OSU uses at its other education-based childcare center on its main campus in Corvallis, where it’s currently hiring for early childhood educators with a comprehensive benefits package and up to $59,800 in annual wages.

It’s one of the reasons Shapiro was drawn to the OSU-Cascades center.

“That living wage is so important — happy teachers, happy kids, less turnover,” said Shapiro, who works for Central Oregon Community College.

“I really loved that it was a teaching facility that was also a lab school where early childhood educators could come in and practice before they go out into the world.”

Like many infant care programs, getting into Little Kits was not easy. Shapiro started calling the center to get on their waitlist before Jori was born. One to two year waitlists are not uncommon for Central Oregon infant care, and some future parents join waitlists before they even become pregnant.

“Some people pay me a year ahead for tuition for a child that hasn’t been born yet, and might not be born for six months,” said Sharon Richardson, owner of Sprouts Montessori in Bend. Parents looking for infant care in Bend are in a desperate situation, she said, “because there’s almost no infant childcare available, especially high-quality slots.”

She said her preschool program has 250 people on the waitlist, and she’s opening another facility in Bend on July 6.

Finding the right fit

In Deschutes County, there are twice as many kids as day care spots, according to Oregon Department of Early Learning and Care and U.S. Census data.

But that number can feel even lower to parents because many are too expensive or don’t fit the family’s needs in terms of commute or hours.

Like many parents, Shapiro compromised: She ended up paying $600 more than her other option and didn’t receive any state subsidies to offset Little Kits tuition

She wasn’t happy with her alternative option and said she considered quitting her job until Little Kits called to tell her they had space for Jori.

Alex Cockfield, another Little Kits parent, was sending her one-and-a-half-year-old daughter, Leila, to day care with full state subsidies.

She said she couldn’t find anything for about a month, until she reached out to Richardson at Sprouts Montessori.

“They actually expedited the process when they heard about Little Kits closing,” Cockfield said.

Cockfield just graduated in June from OSU-Cascades with a kinesiology degree and is a low-income single working mom. She said things are still up in the air.

At Little Kits, her daughter’s tuition was covered by Employment Related Day Care and Baby Promise subsidies, but that won’t be the case at Sprouts Montessori. She’ll only get ERDC funding, but she’s still waiting to get the identification number that will let her use the funds.

“We’re supposed to start next week, so I’m hoping it all works,” she said.

Little Kits was one of five programs in Bend that accepted Baby Promise funding, but after it closes, just four programs providing a total of 52 subsidized slots will be left.

“And, none of them have space,” Cockfield said.

Staffing crisis

The lack of viable slots is part of a childcare staffing crisis, said Robin Taylor, executive director for the Oregon Association for the Education of Young Children.

“We see that in every part of the ecosystem,” Taylor said. “There are classrooms that are smaller than they could be because there are not enough people to staff those spaces.”

Infant care is demanding work and has some of the highest turnover due to physical and emotional demands and traditionally low wages, she said. Childcare workers in the state earned an average of $38,000 last year, according to state employment data.

“Sometimes it can feel sort of confusing to people because our early childhood educators and care providers are among the lowest paid people in our workforce, and yet we still have this astronomical cost of childcare,” Taylor said.

OSU-Cascades employed six full-time staff and had about 20 student workers, according to its website. The university charged $920 to $2,340 in monthly tuition and enrolled 24 children, aged 0 to 5.

Part of what makes infant care so expensive is state-mandated staffing ratios. One teacher can only watch up to four infants. When kids get older, the staff-to-child ratio increases to 1 to 10 for children aged 3 to 5, according to the Oregon Department of Early Learning and Care.

Deschutes County families spent 17.5% of their yearly income on center-based infant care and 16.1% on toddler care in 2022, according to U.S. Department of Labor data.

Public-private partners

OSU-Cascades said it will work to rent the new, purpose-built space to a private day care provider and not try to operate its own center.

It’s the same approach that nearby Central Oregon Community College took with The Children’s Learning Center, a Madras-based private childcare center.

Like OSU-Cascades, COCC built a new childcare facility that opened earlier this year in February. But the college didn’t have OSU-Cascades’ good fortune and lost out on $3 million in anticipated federal funds that were earmarked for the project.

However, the college was still able to complete the work and open a new building by replacing the lost dollars with continued fundraising and by pulling from reserves.

“COCC used a lot of their own funding to complete that work, to complete that promise to Jefferson County, to the families, to the children, to the taxpayer,” said Howell, the program’s director. “To say, ‘Yes, we made a commitment to you and we are going to finish the job,’ and it is remarkable.”

The college leased the space to Teresa Martin, executive director of The Children’s Learning Center, instead of hiring staff to run the center.

Howell said running a childcare center would have been a mistake because there are already qualified day care providers in the region — including many that the college has trained — who could do the job. COCC chose Martin’s business for its reputation and established relationship.

The Children’s Learning Center has worked with COCC students needing job training experience for their ECE classes for years, said Martin.

The center’s total annual budget is $3.6 million, with about 80% to 90% going to staffing and $5,000 a month to rent the new space, Martin said.

But the center, too, is facing a squeeze by trying to pay its teachers more.

“We have to charge more in order to pay those livable wages,” she said.

This fall, Martin is increasing tuition to $1,500 a month to cover the wages, plus the rising costs of food and insurance. Every year costs go up, she said.

Still looking for answers

After news of the Little Kits closure broke, local and state elected officials met with OSU-Cascades interim chancellor and dean, Christine Pollard, to ask what happened. School officials even had a conversation with a local news outlet on the condition that they not be quoted for an op-ed.

OSU’s Family Resource Director Amy Luhn met with families after the news broke, according to parents, but they weren’t given much help to navigate the transition, Shapiro said.

Public records from county and state offices and emails that parents shared show that Little Kits parents reached out to university officials and staff but were met with rote responses or silence.

State Rep. Emerson Levy, a Democrat representing parts of Central Oregon, called the university’s behavior “cagey,” and Deschutes County Commissioner Phil Chang said he wished the university had communicated about the closure sooner. Chang helped the university secure some of the public money used to build the day care center.

Days before Little Kits was set to close, Shapiro and Cockfield were mourning the loss of their community. For Cockfield, childcare is still an uncertainty. If she can’t get any day care subsidies, she’ll put her educational and career goals on hold.

She hopes to attend OSU-Cascades’ doctor of physical therapy program, but can’t do that unless she finds full-time child care.

“It was kind of a miraculous thing … to be able to receive any child care. It enabled me to finish my degree,” she said.

Cockfield is grateful for the time she had at the OSU-Cascades day care, but there was a lot of uncertainty in the way that Little Kits closed so suddenly, she said.

She’s now looking towards the next chapter, trying not to dwell on the potential barriers that could derail her efforts to create a better future for herself and her daughter, Leila, but the uncertainty remains.

“I’m still not sure who’s gonna watch her this Friday,” she said.

News Source : https://www.opb.org/article/2026/07/02/little-kits-daycare-child-care-oregon-central-bend/