St. Catherine University to shutter 93-year-old early learning center in May

Frederick Melo, Pioneer Press
Updated ·5 min read
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When her previous daycare provider announced last year that it would close shop, Melanie Mortensen spent months looking for a replacement program for Lumi, her 2-1/2-year-old daughter. She found the perfect fit in her eyes: a full-day Montessori program located on the campus of St. Catherine University in St. Paul, with excellent ratings and nearly a century of experience.

On Thursday, the family was in for another shock. An email from the director of St. Kate’s Early Childhood Center indicated, apologetically, that the 93-year-old center would close its doors permanently on May 24.

The news, which appeared to take even the center’s director and its pre-school teachers by almost as much surprise as parents, has left as many as 19 families scrambling to find replacement childcare and pre-school instruction while the abrupt closure. Enrollment for the center’s summer session, now canceled, had just begun.

“They’re completely blindsiding us,” said Mortensen on Monday.

“When we talked to the staff, they had only found out the day before,” she added. “They were given equally vague information. When my daughter’s previous childcare center closed, we were given almost a full year’s notice … which is a lot more reasonable to find something else.”

Staffing shortages, declining enrollment

On Monday, a spokesperson for St. Kate’s said the university had been evaluating the Early Childhood Center for several years and weighing costs against industry-wide challenges such as staffing shortages and declining enrollment during the pandemic.

The center, which once enrolled 30 students, provides instruction for 19 this year and did the same for 19 last year.

“We really can’t manage this to the quality standard we’d like,” said Sarah Voigt, a spokesperson for St. Kate’s. “When you talk about about the fact that it’s been around 93 years, that makes this decision all the more difficult.”

The email announcement last week cited changes in state grant funding for pre-kindergarten programs as an issue, though it did not elaborate on how that would impact the university.

Voigt, in a follow-up email, explained that a state Childcare Stabilization Grant backed by federal pandemic-era relief funding has been replaced by the new Great Start Compensation Support grant, which does not allow centers to use its grant funds to offset operational losses. That’s exactly how the relief dollars had been applied at the ECC, Voigt said.

Tracey Gran, senior vice president and chief financial officer for St. Kate’s, responded to an email inquiry Monday morning from a group of parents.

“The changing landscape of preschool and early childhood education, combined with the growth of free public Pre-K programs and changes in state grant funding, have created a cumulative effect where the operations and finances of this center have grown increasingly difficult to manage,” wrote Gran, in her email.

A 93-year history

Founded in 1931 by Ann Harvey of the Sisters of St. Joseph of Carondelet, the Early Childhood Center originated as an instructional lab intended to educate women to teach young kids.

The full-day center, no longer staffed by nuns, currently enrolls 15 children, most of them ages 3 and 4, in its Montessori program, which emphasizes independent, self-directed learning under the methods developed by Maria Montessori in the early 1900s.

The center, which is located on Randolph Avenue in the lower level of St. Mary Hall, hosts at least four additional kids in a more structured and traditional preschool classroom housed in the same building. Both programs will end within weeks.

Nationally, closures of daycare providers and early learning centers appear to be mounting despite demand for affordable, quality childcare.

The federal American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 pumped $24 billion in stabilization funds into childcare programs across the nation. That funding ran out in September, leaving an estimated 70,000 providers at risk of closing, according to estimates based on surveys conducted by The Century Foundation, a progressive thinktank.

Those numbers, impacting as many as 3.2 million kids across the country, included more than 2,400 childcare providers in Minnesota in perilous straits.

Even before the pandemic, providers were struggling. In 2018, both the University of St. Thomas and the University of Minnesota announced they would close their on-campus childcare centers, which were open to faculty, staff, students and members of the surrounding community.

Public outcry kept the U of M Child Development Laboratory School open in Minneapolis, where it operates separately from a YMCA early childhood learning center that opened on the Minneapolis campus in 2021.

Key partnerships on campus, in the community

Claire Repp of Merriam Park was enrolled in the St. Kate’s program as a young child in the 1990s. Fast forward nearly 30 years, and she was delighted to discover it was still around, virtually unchanged in its educational philosophy. Her 4-year-old daughter June is in her second year in the center’s Montessori program, in a classroom that had about seven kids last year and 15 this session.

At the childhood center, “enrollment was low during the COVID years but it picked back up,” Repp said. “Staff say they get a couple inquiries a week. People are pretty desperate to find childcare for this age group. There was a waitlist for the classroom my daughter’s in.”

Over the years, kids from the center have been woven into the campus community in a variety of ways, Repp said, from Christmas caroling in the surrounding area to visiting elders at the Carondelet Village senior community on Fairview Avenue.

The university last summer constructed a “state-of-the-art” playground nearby, near Alberta Hall and Georgia Hall, two on-campus apartment buildings that house student families, she noted. St. Kate’s, which is known for its school of social work, has had occupational and speech therapists assist at the Early Childhood Center through a partnership with Fontbonne University.

“My daughter loves this place,” Repp said. “And obviously I have a personal connection to it.”

As of Monday evening, an online petition drawn up by parents aimed at saving the Early Childhood Center had drawn 181 signatures and dozens of comments, some from residents saying the center had serviced multiple generations of their family.

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