Zion Closure Leaves Families in Flux

Zion Early Child Care Center has served children in West Jacksonport since 2011. File photo.

Just as the final nails are getting pounded into place at the new Door County Child Development Center near Culver’s in the Town of Sevastopol, and the Northern Door Children’s Center (NDCC) embarks on phase II of its expansion campaign in Sister Bay, a new bombshell was dropped into the laps of families at Zion Early Childhood Center (ECC). 

The school and daycare in West Jacksonport has notified the families of the 60 children enrolled there that the center will close on Dec. 22 with no immediate plans to reopen. 

The news has left dozens of families in shock. 

“What do we do now?” said Briana Blink, whose nearly two-year-old son attended Zion for two days per week. 

“I’m also 28 weeks pregnant,” she said. “Thankfully I grew up here so my parents are here and my grandparents and we have friends who can help, but we honestly don’t have a long-term plan.”

The closure came with no warning. Zion treasurer Jason Bieri said the board had to dismiss director Betsy Ploor in October for reasons he could not disclose, and two additional employees subsequently left, leaving the center without half of its staff. 

“Once the three employees were gone we had to notify half the families we could no longer serve them starting Oct. 30,” he said. “In the following weeks the church had to make decisions on reloading, restaffing or resigning from the daycare business.”

Bieri said the daycare, which the church has operated for 12 years, loses $700-$1,000 per week through the winter, and after the loss of staff, the congregation voted to close the ECC completely rather than continue to make up the gap. Raising tuition wasn’t a solution either. 

“We charge $52 a day for infants, and a little less for older toddlers,” he said. “At some point, I don’t know how some of these families can afford daycare. By the time you make your wage, pay your taxes and put your driving in, could you pay $80 a day?’

Even if they could raise tuition or make up the funding shortfall, the center would still need to find new staff.

Bieri said the board tried to work with United Way and other partners to get funding through the winter but could not find a solution. They also investigated the possibility of a third party coming in to run the daycare, but that presents a new set of hurdles. 

Parochial organizations are exempt from some state building and operational requirements, but if a third party comes in, Bieri said the building would require a number of improvements to plumbing, heating and cooling, fire safety systems and other areas that could cost more than $100,000 to complete. 

Bieri said the church is urgently evaluating the future of the school facility. What was previously a K-8 school will now operate only as a 4 and 5-year-old kindergarten for the remainder of this year. 

“I’m confident there’s going to be a school or daycare in that facility next summer, I just don’t know who will run it,” Bieri said. “It’s just going to take some time for the congregation to figure it out.”

For Melanie and Martin Ramirez, parents of six children and two enrolled at Zion, the timing could not have been worse.

Ramirez had sent all six of her kids to Northern Door Children’s Center, where she used to work as a part-time bookkeeper, until October, when a spot finally opened up at Zion. She loved NDCC, but she lives near Sevastopol School and switching to Zion would save 45 minutes of driving each day, so on Oct. 16, she began bringing her two youngest children there three days a week before heading to work at Nicolet Bank in Egg Harbor. 

Two weeks later she was told the center might close. 

“I would take that commute back in a heartbeat,’ she said. 

Ramirez put her name back on the list at NDCC, but she’s now at the bottom of a list of 20 families, and the waitlist for the new center in Sturgeon Bay, slated to open in January, is even longer. Her husband works full-time at Midwest Wire in Sturgeon Bay, so she’s not sure what they will do to fill the gap.

“I’m trying not to think about it, honestly,” Ramirez said. 

Blink is uncertain as well. She is the director of guest services at Newport Resort in Egg harbor, and her husband works full-time as the warehouse manager at Stone’s Throw Winery. When they moved to the southern end of Egg Harbor, Zion was a perfect solution for the family to continue working full-time and save on transportation. 

For now, they’ll patch it together to replace their part-time needs that Zion once fulfilled.

“The people who had kids there five days a week, I can’t even imagine how they’re going to do it,” she said.