The Growing Place has until the end of June to move
Amy Eckhart, director of The Growing Place, a child care center in Durango, has reached an agreement with Durango Health and Rehabilitation to extend her commercial lease through the end of June. (Jerry McBride/Durango Herald)
Friday came and went at the Durango Health and Rehabilitation Center — but Amy Eckhart and her child care business The Growing Place stayed.
The Center, acquired by The Ensign Group in September, previously informed Eckhart that its lease would expire last week. She said the notice shook her and the parents of the toddlers in her care.
Eckhart said she was sent scrambling to identify a suitable place to move, and her clients also scrambled to find other child care providers. In interviews, some parents said they or their partner were considering quitting their jobs to care for their children. Four families dropped out of Eckhart’s program.
But on Dec. 3, Eckhart said she and Delaney Mott, director of the Durango Health and Rehabilitation Center — formerly called Junction Creek Health and Rehabilitation Center — reached an agreement to extend her lease after met in person for the first time.
Growing Place’s lease was extended until June 31, giving Eckhart just over six months to find a new location.
Mott said that when she and Eckhart met earlier this month, they planned a 15-minute conversation. But they ended up talking for several hours.
“It highlights a larger problem, like this problem doesn’t start and end with this space,” Mott told Eckhart on Friday. “You provide incredible care to incredible, cute little children, but it’s, you know, a drop in the bucket when it comes to the care that we need in this community for children. And I think that highlights the problem of lack of resources and lack of child care available in La Plata County.
Eckhart said she was still “crushed.” The Growing Place’s time at the Center is coming to an end, although she is grateful for the extension of her lease.
“It’s 1,000 square feet with a nice yard for these kids. I have to plead my case,” she said.
She asked why there was an emergency: since The Growing Place has existed at the Center, it has never been fully occupied.
Mott said the Center expects to be fully occupied in six months and some spaces are currently empty because rooms are being repainted.
The space at Growing Place will be used for certified nursing assistant training, said Katie Evans, registered nurse and staff development coordinator. She said there is a great need but limited schooling for CNAs in Durango. A training program would allow the Center to develop its own CNAs.
Additionally, the Center employs residents of Utah, Arizona and New Mexico, she said. When the space is not used for training, it could accommodate employees with long commutes with a place to rest.
Mott said Eckhart and his clients’ impression, Ensign, rushed to Durango and kicked off The Growing Place without any understanding of the community or its needs, which is incorrect.
“When we purchased the building, we sat down as a management team and discussed the decision whether or not we wanted to continue the lease, and the management team, consisting of 20 people, has lived here for very many years, many years, we decided that we could better use the space to serve our resident population,” she said.
She said it was also wrong that the Center took care of sex offenders, unlike what was said to Eckhart and some of his parents by an Ensign representative – that children cannot be allowed on site because then the Center would not be able to accept registered sex offenders into its custody.
“We’re a family-oriented company, because we have a lot of people who are either single parents or their kids’ school starts at two o’clock, and they don’t finish school until six o’clock,” he said. -she declared. “I have always allowed children to be inside the facility and bring them to work, so we never have sex offenders inside the building.”
The Center provides short- and long-term care for seniors. Its memory care unit, which works with people with dementia, has only 12 beds, all of them full, and a long waiting list. She said she wasn’t sure where the nearest facility with a memory care unit was.
The Center accepts inpatients for short-term rehabilitation care (two weeks to 30 days), but the need for long-term care in Durango is also great, she said. It is not uncommon for a patient to be admitted to short-term rehabilitation only for their children to later declare that they can no longer care for them.
“They will have multiple falls or not be able to cook or clean for themselves, and then they end up staying with us for long-term care,” she said.
Mott and Eckhart agreed that they are in very similar fields of work, at opposite ends of the age spectrum, and that the need for child care and elder care is great.
In the United States, nursing homes and elder care have a negative reputation, Mott said, and “that’s why we’re working so hard to change that stigma and make it a place that’s open to the community.”
cburney@durangoherald.com