La Plata Economic Development Alliance receives $55,000 for child care needs assessment.
Durango resident and mother of two Heather Haaland made several appearances during public comment periods at recent City Council meetings to ask for action.
She has two sons, a 3½-year-old turning 4 in September and a 12-week-old as of June 18.
Her oldest son is 13 days too young to be accepted into Durango School District 9-R’s universal preschool program this year, which opens the program to 4-year-olds and has a cutoff age date of Sept. 1.
She said because her son is technically too young to start preschool in the fall, she and her husband have to pay for another full year of child care, which is currently costing them nearly $2,900 a month for both of their children.
Haaland’s son, who’s in his second year of child care at the same center, is older than his peers. That makes Haaland worry about his development, she said.
“There are some kids that are not fully verbal, they don’t speak very much, and they use younger kid actions,” she said. “So there’s hitting and biting and kicking. He was starting to do those things when those younger kids were moving up, because that’s how they were communicating. So he was seeing that as like, ‘Oh, this is acceptable.’ And so I worry about things like that.”
She also worries for her son’s teacher, who carries a part-time job in addition to working as a full-time teacher just to make ends meet, she said.
“Olden days, you had schoolhouses with kids of multiple ages,” she said. “But if he’s the oldest and he only knows so much, what can the teacher do when the majority of the students are younger and you can only do so much with your curriculum? I’m afraid that it’s going to be really focused on the younger children,” she said.
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