Serving Whitman County since 1877
Serving Whitman County since 1877
Little Sprouts Early Learning and Childcare Center in Palouse, once considered a solution to a public day care shutdown 16 months ago, will close Aug. 31, after organizers deemed they couldn’t keep up with costs.
The decision came after some setbacks since the non-profit took over the center in January from the Palouse School District, which started it.
The school district decided to close out the day care in May of 2011 after determining they were sustaining losses up to $5,000 per month on the operation. The district maintained the day care until last January while organizers of Little Spouts cleared licensing requirements.
A shutdown of the district’s day care would have left Palouse without a day care service and parents at that time said they were facing the possibility of taking their children to Pullman.
“We thought we were going fairly well,” said Jens Hegg, president of Little Sprouts. “But it took six months to get our accounting up to where we could forecast. Things are up and down constantly when you’re starting a business.”
Little Sprouts intended to license the preschool room at Palouse School for their operation. But they never did get to use it, because of a fire marshal ruling that the sprinkler system was insufficient.
So Little Sprouts remained in the daycare facility which providesless space and that limited the number of families they could serve.
Hegg indicated two other key problems.
“We had a few too many unexpected bills we had to pay,” he said, explaining that there were no large items per se, but things like having to pay almost $800 for the non-profit license. A third issue was the tax liability for the number of employees they had, Hegg said.
Eventually, the board for Little Sprouts reached a crossroads.
They had done significant fundraising in the past, but Hegg said they didn’t think of that as sustainable.
“We didn’t see more fundraising in the future at the rate we had last year,” he said.
Garth Meyer is a former Whitman County Gazette reporter.
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