By MIKE COURSON
Great Bend Post
The goal of Advancing Barton County Childcare (ABCC) is to provide affordable daycare to working parents in the county. The goal of the Kansas Children's Cabinet and Trust Fund Child Care Capacity Accelerator is to help counties meet childcare needs. Those goals have merged well for local residents. Wednesday morning, Great Bend Economic Development Director Sara Arnberger announced that ABCC had received $2.23 million from the trust to use toward childcare in Barton County.
"It is one of the top-five awards in the state so we are extremely proud of it, and very thankful that the Children's Cabinet and Trust saw that our project was deemed worthy enough to get that much money," Arnberger said. "The funding will finish our funding for the Great Bend facility, and also the funding for one more."
Groundbreaking for the new 6,500-square-foot facility is set for Tuesday, July 11 at Farmer's Plaza, located at 10th Street and K-96 Highway in Great Bend. That facility will accommodate up to 59 children and had an initial price tag of $1.6 million. The grant will make the construction of another similar but smaller facility possible, and Arnberger said ABCC will release the location of that facility during the July 11 groundbreaking ceremony.
"Our plan was always to take childcare into the county, so it was never going to be just one center," she said. "But it always had a lengthy timeline with it. This certainly speeds things up quite a bit more than we ever anticipated. It really did exactly what the grant wanted. It's the Capacity Accelerator Grant, so this is expanding the capacity of childcare in Barton County, and it's accelerating this progress a lot more than we could have hoped for."
Arnberger credits JR Robl, a grant writer for GMLV Architecture, with writing the grant. And she credits the many donors that have already stepped forward to help make the first daycare facility a possibility.
"We've had great partners: Barton County, the Patterson Family Foundation, local donors, etc.," Arnberger said. "There have been plenty of funding partners along the way to help us get this far, and honestly, to help us be competitive for this grant. We had to have a pretty significant match to be able to get this much money."
Groundbreaking on the first facility is set for 9 a.m. on July 11.