For more than 20 years, the Sunshine Station Child Care Center has offered day care services for children in the Upper Susitna Valley. Since Executive Director Kelsey Demarce took over the Center in 2022, the facility has needed to expand.
Just this year, the Center received $4.5 million from the Lisa Murkowski grant program to expand. Demarce says the team is working with Wolf Architecture, the firm that designed the head start buildings in Wasilla and Palmer.
Current capacity is 26 students, but the new facility will be able to accommodate 72, but it’s unlikely they will be able to meet the staff ratio required for that many children right away. Demarce says she hopes they will be able to use the current building for programming they can’t offer right now.
“In my mind, this current space is going to turn into our after-school program because Talkeetna currently does not have an after-school program.”
And she hopes they can offer other services too.
“One of the needs across the board that I’ve heard from families in our community is that they would really like a drop-in service, a true drop-in where a mom could be like ‘Hey I need to go to Costco today and I could get that trip done in half the time if my kid was at day care.’”
The new facility will have four separate spaces for infants, toddlers, three-year-olds, and pre-K classrooms. Sunshine Clinic gave the Child Care Center the four acres of land to enable the expansion efforts. Demarce says that was one reason they secured the grant.
The Murkowski grant will support the design and part of the construction costs, but that funding is not in hand yet. Demarce says she hopes other grants will help cover the rest of the funding needs, about two million dollars. And Mat-Su Health Foundation has already begun funding the new build.
“Mat-Su Health [Foundation] gave us some funding to get started. So we’ve already started geotech, dirt work, and all that now.”
Demarce says she hopes they will be able to break ground on the new facility in spring 2026.
