NICK GOSNELL
Hutch Post
HUTCHINSON, Kan. — Central Christian School is on the home stretch of fundraising for its childcare facility expansion.
"The historic fire station that's on our campus, we purchased that in 2012, and it's served a variety of purposes over the last several years at the school," said Dr. John Walker with Central Christian School. "We've used it as a industrial arts facility. We've used it most recently as a weightlifting facility and maintenance shop, and by the Lord's kindness, we just completed a brand new 1,600 square foot weightlifting facility that we should be moving into this summer. And so our students will be moving into there. What will happen with that fire station is that we'll actually be remodeling it and adding six classrooms to the east of that fire station, right off of 30th Street. And so we will be doubling our capacity. Right now we can service about 50 children, by the time that we complete this project, we'll be right around 100 children served at our childcare facility."
The new facility will be for birth to school age.
"Children that are six weeks old all the way through school age," Walker said. "That could be five years old, six years old, depending on when their birthday falls and when they enroll in kindergarten. Right now we do toddler through school age, which is one year old or walking up through school age. And so we're actually looking forward to expanding that to take those families who need childcare from infant care, which would be six weeks old through school age. I believe that the requirements are that you can have one teacher per three pupils when it's that young. So essentially your capacity to operate infant care is more challenging because you can't watch as many children and rightfully so."
Most of the money has been raised for the expansion at this point.
"By God's grace, we are currently sitting at 75% given or committed to this project, which is such a blessing," Walker said. "That comes by way of lots of help with the accelerator grant that many other institutions received. We got a $336,000 grant for that. And additionally, we had several large commitments, several large gifts. So to date, total committed or given today is $1,595,000. Our total cost of the project is gonna be around $2.1 million. So our gap is just north of $500,000 that we have left to fundraise."
If you would like to give, you can do so online. For more information, call Walker at the school at (620) 663-2174.
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