Door County’s Largest Child Care Center Ready for Construction

The new Door Community Child Development Center will be 18,500 square feet, compared with the 6,600-square-foot facility that the center currently leases from the YMCA at 1743 Egg Harbor Road in Sturgeon Bay. The design of the new building – which will be licensed for 144 children versus 83 at the current location – was intentional to “capture the traditions of Door County,” said Alexis Fuller, the center’s co-founder and executive director. “We were going for a mixture of cottage, farmhouse and industrial.”

What will be Door County’s largest licensed child care facility has been cleared for construction at the intersection of Gordon Road and Old Highway Road, just west of the Culver’s in Sevastopol.

“We break ground in March and will open in January 2024,” said Alexis Fuller, executive director and co-founder with her sister, Bridgett Starr, of the Door Community Child Development Center (DOCO).

DOCO currently operates at 1743 Egg Harbor Road in Sturgeon Bay. Its licensed capacity is for 83 children, from infants to 4-year-olds, and its capacity is second only to Northern Door Children’s Center in Sister Bay, which has a capacity for 112 children. When DOCO’s new facility is finished, it will have a capacity for 146 children.

The new facility will include a large community room, a commercial kitchen and a sensory room that will allow children to receive therapeutic services. The new center will offer a nature-based curriculum and will expand existing operations with 16 additional infant spots, an entire Head Start program for up to 18 children, and after-school and summer-camp options for children aged 4-7.

DOCO’s new facility will be 18,500 square feet versus the 6,600 square feet in the existing building that it leases from the YMCA. Fuller and Starr opened the DOCO doors of that building Sept. 19, 2020. The center replaced the former Barker Child Development Center, which shut its doors in the summer of 2020, leaving the parents of some 80 children scrambling for child care.

That need has only grown. Last October, when DOCO was in full planning mode for the new facility, Fuller had a waiting list of 108 children, the majority of those infants and 1-year-olds: 28 infants, 35 1-year-olds and 16 expectant mothers.

That’s a problem for the business model of any child care center and a primary reason for the child care shortage that afflicts not only Door County, but communities across the country. 

“We actually lose money on infants,” Fuller said. “They cost the center money, whereas the older kids bring that income back.”

To stabilize their business model, Fuller said they focused on retaining staff by creating a good environment and a career path for their 28 employees, most of whom work full time. About 85% of their tuition goes toward staff wages. 

“So we fundraise a lot for the other things we need,” Fuller said. “We do community outreach for things, [and] have our scholarship program.”

Feeling they had come up with a plan for a stable workforce, they developed a business plan for a larger facility and applied for a Workforce Innovation Grant through United Way of Door County. The $3.5 million grant that United Way received in 2021 will fund part of the construction for the new center.

“We will be starting a capital campaign to cover the additional costs of building the center,” Fuller said. “More information on that will be released in March.”

To make the center a reality, Fuller had to receive multiple approvals from the Town of Sevastopol and County of Door, a process that began in 2022 and involved rezoning 10 acres of the 50-acre parcel, then securing conditional-use permits to operate the center.

The final approval came in January. The approximately 40 acres of land not used as part of the DOCO campus will be maintained for community trails.

“Our hope is that these trails provide a safe and family-friendly environment [for] children and adults of all ages and abilities to enjoy year-round,” Fuller said.