Officials broke ground Tuesday on a new childcare center at Martin Luther King Jr. Recreational Park, a project meant to replace an aging facility and add capacity amid a regional childcare shortage.
The Montgomery County Department of General Services will oversee construction of the center, built just east of the existing Horizon Childcare facility, in partnership with the county’s Department of Health and Human Services and Montgomery Parks. The current modular building, found to be in poor condition during a 2020 survey, will be demolished once the new center is complete, and the site will be returned to green space.
“We looked at that back in 2020, so six years ago, and found it, frankly, in very poor condition and not able to be rehabilitated,” County Executive Marc Elrich said at the event. “Plus, the needs and trends and practices of modern day childcare have advanced well beyond when these facilities were originally designed and constructed.”
The new building will be larger than its predecessor, adding childcare slots at a time when demand outpaces supply. Lori Garibay Aquino, chief of Children, Youth, and Family Services, Department of Health and Human Services, said the shortage extends well beyond the county.
“We know that there’s not enough childcare for working families, across the nation, let alone here in our county,” Aquino said. She said the county is working with local providers on “innovative solutions” to expand access.
Montgomery Parks owns the land and is leasing the site to the county, an arrangement also used for other neighborhood recreation and childcare facilities. Miti Figueredo, director of Parks, Maryland-National Capital Park and Planning, said the department has a role to play even though it does not run childcare programs directly.
“We hear a lot about our housing crisis, but we have a childcare crisis, too,” Figueredo said. “As a parks department, we don’t deliver childcare services. We deliver parks, but we have land, and where we can, we want to help be part of the solution.”
The new center will include an adjacent playground accessible from Jackson Road, with rubber floor tiles replacing the current dirt surface, along with updated security systems and controlled access points. Elrich, a former teacher, said early investment in childhood education pays long-term dividends, noting that children who fall behind before kindergarten often struggle to catch up in later grades.
Officials did not announce a completion date for the project.
