A new child care center is currently under construction on the Oregon State University-Cascades campus, the college announced this week. The Little Kits Early Care and Education Center will serve infant children through preschool and is anticipated to open in August.
The 7,200 square-foot building, on the southwest corner of the OSU–Cascades campus, will include classrooms designed for early care and education, an outdoor play area and parking.
The school anticipates it will eventually serve up to 72 children. However, initial capacity will be limited, due to regional and national shortages of qualified early care and educational professions, as well as budget constraints, according to a press release.
The OSU Family Resource Center, which operates the college’s early care and education centers at the Corvallis campus and at its currently operating Little Beavs Early Learning Center on the Bend campus, will run the program.
Following the opening of this new center, the Little Beavs Early Learning Center in Bend, launched in 2020 to accommodate students and faculty who lacked child care, will close.
Children who currently attend Little Beavs will be guaranteed enrollment at the newly constructed Little Kits center. Staff will also transfer to the new center, and the school will begin recruiting more staff members beginning this spring.
According to Christine Coffin, Director of Communications at OSU-Cascades, Little Beavs was a pop-up program aimed at both attracting more people to child care while offering services to students and faculty members who were lacking in care due to the pandemic.
“We acted really fast to stand up that center. It had some ups and downs, but it basically has sustained over the last five years,” Coffin said.
The program was housed in classroom buildings that were designed for undergraduates. While the classrooms were retrofitted over the years, Coffin said it was not necessarily designed for toddlers and infants.
Since 2021, the college has been looking into expanding its child care center. With more support from the community, and available funding, Coffin said the timing finally felt right for growth.
“Over five years, we’ve seen the need for care. That gave us additional confidence in designing the Little Kits center,” she told the Source Weekly.
According to Coffin, the new center will feel very different, offering a much larger space with classrooms designed for children. It will also serve as a better space to host undergraduate internships and practicums, helping to build a pipeline of students who wish to work in the early childhood field.
Funding for the project was provided through the American Rescue Plan Act by Deschutes County and the state, in 2021. Additional funding in 2022 was sponsored by U.S. Senators Ron Wyden and Jeff Merkley through a community development grant from the Department of Housing and Urban Development, according to a press release.
OSU-Cascades received a total of about $3.4 million for the project, which Coffin said is all going toward construction costs.
“Childcare is a very difficult model. This region has been a child care desert, with a lack of spots for families, but also a lack of qualified staff,” Coffin told the Source Weekly. “We’re starting to see signs that qualified staff are becoming available. That’s a part of the timing — you know, we didn’t want to build a center that that we wouldn’t be able to staff.”
This article appears in The Source Weekly March 13, 2025.
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