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Sep 20, 2023

Lincoln woman overcomes obstacles to open child care center

Nova Trumler (left), 3, and Paxton Netsvetayer, 4, play as they build a house at Creative Minds Early Learning Center. Brandy Trapp was ready. She’d painted walls and bought pint-sized furniture and

Nova Trumler (left), 3, and Paxton Netsvetayer, 4, play as they build a house at Creative Minds Early Learning Center.

Brandy Trapp was ready.

She’d painted walls and bought pint-sized furniture and amassed toys and blocks and giant primary-colored numbers — all the pieces and parts and equipment and plans she needed to make her dream a reality.

At least that’s what she thought.

The dream: to open a child care business called Creative Minds Early Learning Center in a commercial area surrounded by apartments and big trees in southeast Lincoln, across the street from Edgewood Shopping Center.

The reality: That wasn’t going to happen just yet, and it wasn’t going to be easy.

She’d leased the building at 5521 Shady Creek Court in January — where a child care center had previously been located — and by April was ready to apply for her child care license. She hoped to be open by May.

The exterior of Creative Minds Early Learning Center, 5521 Shady Creek Court.

She dropped the application in the mail and (in what might have been fate foreshadowing troubles to come) immediately realized she forgot to add postage. So she waited there until the mail carrier came and fixed that problem.

The others weren’t so easy.

Weeks later, she got a letter from the state saying she forgot to include her certificate of zoning in her application. She called the city and found out her business wasn’t zoned for a child care facility, despite the fact that her lease said that was the only use allowed.

“My dream quickly became a nightmare,” she said.

She spent the next two months battling bureaucracy and getting different answers from different agencies — and from different people in the same city departments. She filed papers, tried to do what she was told to do, went before the Lincoln-Lancaster County Planning Commission then the City Council and — ultimately — opened in July.

But the protracted process, and uncertainty about getting the special permit, meant she couldn’t launch her website, or advertise for hiring or enrollment — and that hurt her ability to open at full strength.

She’s convinced she still wouldn’t be open had it not been for a regular customer in the Press Box, which her parents own, who suggested she call then-City Councilman Richard Meginnis, who also knew her family.

Meginnis helped assemble other council members, as well as officials from the city’s building and safety and planning departments, and he contacted Anne Brandt, the executive director of Lincoln Littles, a nonprofit that advocates for quality child care.

They helped immensely, Trapp said.

“Everybody’s been beyond supportive and helpful ... Honestly, I wouldn’t have known what to do or who to call,” she said. “Unfortunately it’s all who you know, not what you know.”

Trapp said she doesn’t think it should be like that — and she’s not alone.

Last week, the City Council approved a number of amendments to zoning ordinances, including one expanding areas where child care facilities can operate without a special permit — including in commercial areas like the one where Trapp’s business is located. The permits are still required in residential areas.

And in October, many of those same city officials who met to help Trapp will gather with Brandt to look for ways to expedite the process to make it easier for other child care providers.

A classroom at Creative Minds Early Learning Center in Lincoln.

In Lincoln, Brandt said, more than 74% of children 5 years and younger need care because parents in the household work. That means that of the roughly 22,000 children of that age in the Capital City, three-quarters of them could potentially need child care.

“Because of that we need to be able to support businesses that want to get into (child care) to make sure there’s not unnecessary hurdles that need to be cleared,” she said.

***

Trapp lived in Arizona and managed retail stores until she got pregnant and moved home in 2015 to be closer to family. Her son, she said, made her realize a passion for early childhood education.

She enrolled in an early childhood education program at Southeast Community College in January 2020 — and spent the next two years taking classes online in the middle of a global pandemic.

She graduated in December 2022 with a 4.0 GPA. She applied for a few jobs, then decided what she really wanted to do was open her own business.

Unbeknownst to Trapp, the building she leased was in a commercial area that required a special permit to operate a child care business. It was a fact that had apparently been overlooked with the previous child care business, even though years earlier the building owner had applied for the special permit then withdrew it.

She tried hard to be prepared. Before sending the application for her child care license to the state, she’d asked several inspectors — with state licensing as well as a local health and fire inspector — to take a look and see if she needed to do anything more before the official inspection to comply with the licensing requirements.

They told her it looked good.

But now she had to get a building permit — which required filing paperwork showing she complied with all the health and safety requirements. And on paper, in part because she didn’t realize what the city wanted, she didn’t pass the inspections.

Although the inspectors who’d seen her business earlier continued to try to help, she got different answers from others.

“It was just confusing,” she said. “No one’s on the same page.”

She submitted a layout of her business, not realizing it wasn't the technical site plans required. An inspector told her federal rules required she put in a drinking fountain, so she had to tear up her newly painted walls, working at night with her son in tow. She had to add a fire-protectant coating to the walls. She had to put a different fire door on her utility closet and make other changes where she kept the mop.

“I was at a loss,” she said. “Every day was so stressful.”

Every time there was an issue with an inspection, she said, she had to start at the beginning of the building permit process. She made the changes necessary, but the Lincoln Littles folks and the city officials she’d met helped streamline the process for her.

“They don’t give instructions on how you go through building and safety,” she said. “You just have to guess.”

Lincoln Littles' Brandt said there are many different agencies that child care providers have to work with, and they all have certain requirements.

“Each one of these entities is just doing their job, but it’s not necessarily user-friendly,” she said.

Lincoln Littles can help by being a place where providers can come to get help and answers and, she said, hopefully help streamline the process by getting everyone in the same room and hearing the challenges facing both city agencies and child care providers.

“We’re trying to get agencies to talk to each other,” she said. “They’re just saying what they know and adhering to what their rules are. What we need is communication within the agencies about what it looks like in real time for people going through the process.”

Planning Director David Cary said his department had already been considering making zoning rules more flexible for child care facilities, and Trapp’s situation was the latest example that convinced them to make changes.

Chad Blahak, director of building and safety, said having Lincoln Littles as a resource is a great option for people. Many developers who apply for building permits know the system well, but for those who don’t it can be challenging.

The five or six employees who work on building permits do their best, but the city issues about 4,000 building permits a year, he said. The majority go through without a problem, and Blahak said he gets involved with just a few where there are issues, such as in Trapp’s case, which was an unusual situation.

***

Eventually, Trapp got her building permit, the blessing of the Planning Commission and City Council, and her child care license and was able to open her doors at Shady Creek Court.

Teachers Alexia Borch (from left) and Amy Northrup teach a cooking class with students Paxton Netsvetayer, 4, Nova Trumler, 3, Lucas Dodge, 4, and Amari Brock, 4, at Creative Minds Early Learning Center.

She has seven children now and will get an eighth on Sept. 1, but she’s licensed for 75. She will need to hire more staff, but wants to get the word out about her business and what she has to offer. Because she wants to succeed, she said, for her son, her family and the community.

Her hope: to help change the system and make it better for providers and children. At Creative Minds, children are in mixed-age groups and move to different open learning centers, rather than staying in one room all day.

“I really want to make a change in child care and what I believe child care could or should be,” she said.

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Contact the writer at [email protected] or 402-473-7226. On Twitter at @LJSReist.

In addition changing zoning rules to expand where child care businesses can operate, the City Council approved other changes aimed at helping certain small businesses. They include:

*Expanding the areas where small-scale commercial kitchens can operate. The changes will allow businesses that don't sell food on-site -- such as catering businesses or those that sell foods online or at farmer's markets -- to operate in commercial or industrial districts.

*Expanding the definition of alcohol crafting to include micro-distilleries as well as craft breweries, which are allowed in commercial and zoning districts.

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