MISSOULA, Mont. — From the outside, the building that was once Cold Springs Elementary School in Missoula, Montana, looks abandoned. Beige paint peels from its cinder-block facade. A blue banner proclaiming “graduation matters” hangs tattered and bleached by the sun. But inside, past a vacant office and around a dimly lit corner, there’s a stack of brand new cots, shoe racks with tiny sandals and the telltale smell of graham crackers.

Five independent child care centers opened here in the spring, the first participants in a unique network called Missoula Child Care Advantage, or MCCA. A sixth center plans to open its doors at Cold Springs in September. When the programs reach full capacity, they’ll serve a combined total of up to 90 kids, infant through pre-school.

Like many communities across the country, Missoula County has a desperate shortage of affordable child care. But Missoulians have found one part of the solution hiding in plain sight: unused public buildings, such as schools closed to accommodate changing enrollments. Cold Springs Elementary was bursting at its nearly 90-year-old seams when it shut its doors in late 2018 and its students moved to a new facility.

As the retrofit projects proceed, new ways of doing the business of child care are emerging, too.

The details of the child care crisis vary by community, but the big picture is the same: Parents are scrambling. More than half of American children under the age of 5 live in a “child care desert,” defined as any census tract where the number of children under 5 is at least triple the number of licensed child care slots. In Montana, the number of slots available meets only 44 percent of total demand, according to the state’s Department of Labor and Industry. For infants, that percentage drops to 32 percent.

Parents Adam Rasmussen and Meredith Repke, who secured one of the initial 42 spots at Cold Springs, are among the lucky ones. For a decade, Missoula offered the couple their ideal lifestyle: mountains within minutes to bike, hike, run, and climb. In late 2022, they welcomed a daughter, Hope. But when it came time for Hope to start in child care a year later, they couldn’t find a single provider with an open slot. At the time, they had been spending a lot of time in Whitefish, a town about 130 miles to the north, due to an illness in the family. When they couldn’t find a child care opening in Missoula, they opted to stay in Whitefish while they continued the search.

MCCA’s opening felt too good to be true, Repke said. Hope enrolled at Montessori Plus International, whose founder saw the Cold Springs location as a way to expand her popular day care to a second site. Repke and Rasmussen moved back to Missoula, into a new house a short bike ride away from the school. “It allowed us to resume our lives,” Repke said.

Related: Our biweekly Early Childhood newsletter highlights innovative solutions to the obstacles facing the youngest students. Subscribe for free.

Inside Cold Springs, each of the six MCCA classrooms has been transformed into a unique day care. Through one door, a nature-themed space with fluorescent ceiling lights covered in fabric replicates staring up into a stand of birch trees; through another is Hope’s Montessori-inspired program where children learn to speak in Mandarin.

There are a few hang-ups with the space, said Sally Henkel, who coordinates MCCA under the auspices of the United Way of Missoula County. Due to licensing guidelines written before the network’s inception, children in different child care programs are required to stay strictly apart. This ensures clear accountability if anything goes wrong, said Henkel, who works closely with the county licensor.

For most providers in the area, it’s never an issue because they operate alone. But for the co-located providers at Cold Springs, it makes for a strange dance. And for kids who see other kids but aren’t allowed to interact with them, it’s just confusing. “Outdoor time is awkward,” Henkel said.

Still, the space at Cold Springs is a win. Communities need infrastructure devoted to child care much as they need schools, roads, and bridges. But “there’s no dedicated federal funding source to support that,” said Bevin Parker-Cerkez, who leads early childhood work nationwide for the Local Initiatives Support Corporation (LISC), a community development financial institution. As a result, small-scale child care providers often are on their own when it comes to planning for, maintaining, and upgrading facilities, Parker-Cerkez said. And with barely-there profit margins, upgrades typically aren’t in the budget.

“These are spaces for zero-to-five year olds — they’re getting beat up with wear and tear,” Parker-Cerkez said. “People don’t recognize how much [space] affects the quality of programming. Not just for kids, but for employees, too.”

At Cold Springs, some maintenance costs are built into providers’ $900 per month rent. For small providers who might otherwise operate out of a residence, that’s a steal. The median rent for a two-bedroom house in Missoula is twice that, and housing prices have more than doubled in the past decade.

Missoula County Public Schools’ involvement is a part of what makes MCCA work, said Grace Decker, who spearheaded the network’s formation in her role as the coordinator of Zero to Five Missoula, under the United Way’s umbrella. The district has offered a 5-year lease and cut-rate rent.

But space is only part of the solution to an enormously complex problem. “It’s the pot, but it’s not the soup,” said Decker, who started a new job in March coordinating Montana Advocates for Children, a statewide coalition.

Related: Free child care in America exists — if you cross paths with the right philanthropist

In 2019, Decker began meeting with a group of Missoulians with an interest in the future of child care, including providers, school district officials, and representatives from local businesses and health care. The child care providers painted a bleak picture of their balance sheets. For example, unexpected vacancies — as when a child is pulled out of a center on short notice — can cost them thousands of dollars and threaten their financial survival.

Decker and her collaborators brainstormed ways to alleviate costs. They came up with a plan for a new kind of child care network, open to any licensed provider in Missoula County, in which local businesses could purchase a membership. While the providers would offer child care to all families, employees at member businesses would have waitlist priority. The membership fees paid by the businesses would fund shared access, network-wide, to critical money- and time-saving services like waitlist management, telehealth, and payroll. “That’s where we start to actually stabilize the sector,” Decker said.

Today, Cold Springs school serves as a pilot site for the network. MCCA used a $414,000 state grant and raised about $200,000 more to reconstruct the classrooms as care centers. Two businesses are signed on as charter members. The hope is that the network’s success at Cold Springs will help to drive its growth countywide.

Henkel, whose position is funded by the city, came on as MCCA’s coordinator in January 2023, several months after she was hired. The hold-up? She couldn’t find child care for her 8-month-old son.

On a recent walk through Cold Springs, Henkel and project architect Adam Jones pointed out the changes made to each room to make them child-care ready. Bathrooms were built, electrical sockets were brought up to code, too-porous countertops were replaced.

Asbestos abatement set the project back $12,000. “That could’ve been a lot worse,” said Jones. And rumors of a long-neglected septic tank onsite turned out to be false. “We thought we’d have to tap into brownfield funding,” Henkel said. “That would’ve set us back at least a year.”

Since MCCA’s opening last March, Henkel has fielded calls from child care advocates from other parts of Montana, as well as from Connecticut, Idaho, West Virginia and Wyoming, all looking to learn more about how the network works. A project based directly on MCCA will launch in the fall in Ravalli County, just south of Missoula.

Missoula is not alone in its approach to expanding child care. Other areas around the country faced with the child care space conundrum have looked at using closed school buildings.

In upstate New York, the 2023 closure of a parochial school led to the creation of the Ticonderoga Community Early Learning Center, set to open in September to 50 children, age 5 and under. In Texas, the United Way of Greater Austin expects to invest more than $18 million over at least two years to transform the shuttered Pease Elementary into a child care center for more than 100 children, ages 6 months to 5 years, as well as community spaces to be used for events like parent classes and continuing education for early childhood educators.

Related: Why are we sending children to pre-K programs in converted salons, bars and turkey coops?

And in Portland, Indiana, 95 miles northeast of Indianapolis, crews are completing renovations on the former Judge Haynes Elementary School, which will reopen in September as the Jay County Early Learning Center, serving 150 kids, ages 6 months to 5 years.

For years, the community has been clamoring for more child care options, said Doug Inman, executive director of the Portland Foundation. Well over half of the county’s young children in need of care are not enrolled in a known program, and only 9 percent of those in need of care are in a program deemed high quality, based on a 2018 survey. Providers named “building renovations” as one of the top barriers keeping them from seeking a higher rating.

The Judge Haynes project faced a setback in 2021 when county leaders opted not to provide funding, citing concerns about concentrating child care slots in the county seat rather than scattering them throughout the region. But the foundation’s board pushed ahead, Inman said. They purchased Judge Haynes from the local school district for $35,000 and brought on a seasoned provider with three other Indiana locations to run the center. They ultimately secured about $4 million, mostly from state and philanthropic grants, but also from community members like a Portland retiree who showed up at the foundation offices to pledge $2,500.

Today, the Jay County Early Learning Center has a new roof, floors, lighting, and bathrooms, a kitchen, a lactation room, and a gym. A toddler-friendly playground will be installed in late August, cleared of “all that equipment that would cause you to get a tetanus shot,” Inman said.

“We knew going into this that we were taking a big bite, but this is a generational project,” he said. “If we can be a model for any small community to see that a community of 20,000 people can do this, we’d love to be a place that others can learn from.”

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MINNEAPOLIS — At a late August meeting in a windowless room at Minneapolis College, a handful of students barely a week into classes sat back on couches, took a breath and marveled that they were there at all.

“Gifting myself with an education is a part of my recovery,” said Nomi Badboy, 43, one of three students attending this week’s meeting of the school’s collegiate recovery program. But she admitted to feeling overwhelmed: Her four kids were trying her nerves, her ailing father was requiring more of her time, and a bad-news ex had left her with a destructive puppy and a lingering disbelief that she can pull it all off.

Ray Lombardi, 50, listened thoughtfully. “What I’m hearing is that we have three things in common: It’s hard to be a parent. It’s hard to stay sober. And it’s hard to go back to school as an adult,” he said, adding, “It would be a great tragedy to get sober, get my life in order, and then come here and have college be the cause of going back into using.”

Collegiate recovery programs began appearing at four-year institutions in the late 1970s, offering services like sober-living dorms, life skills classes and recovery coaches. Today, more than 170 programs exist across the U.S. and Canada. But it’s only in the last dozen or so years that programs began popping up at community colleges; Minneapolis College’s program, opened in 2017, was the first in Minnesota and the fifth in the nation.

Today, there are at least 23 recovery programs at community colleges, and their expansion reflects a growing awareness that many survivors of opioid addiction and those who struggled with substance use during the pandemic are now enrolling in pursuit of a fresh start. But despite the need, the programs face significant obstacles, and many are scrambling for dollars and staffing to stay afloat.

Related: More than a third of community colleges have vanished

Substance use disorder affects about 18 percent of American adults, according to national statistics. Among 18- to 25-year-olds, the share is nearly 28 percent. Meanwhile, of the 29 million adults nationwide who said they’ve ever had a problem with substance use, about 72 percent considered themselves to be in recovery or recovered.

Unlike treatment, a necessary but often short-term process, recovery is the long-term work of rebuilding a healthier and typically sober life. Education is an example of what’s called “recovery capital,” something earned that makes long-term recovery more likely.

Community colleges are a natural first step for people in recovery, said Jessica Miller, who oversees four collegiate recovery programs, including two at community colleges, for the Ten16 Recovery Network, a substance use disorder treatment provider in Central Michigan. At two-year institutions, admission is accessible, tuition is affordable, and flexible coursework fits into schedules complicated not only by jobs and families, but counseling, support groups and doctor visits.

“I don’t know why we weren’t trying to do this years ago,” Miller said.

In November, the Association of Recovery in Higher Education, which serves as a hub for the programs, launched a working group tasked in part with editing the guidelines for starting recovery programs to make them more applicable to community colleges. A new networking group for community college program coordinators held its first call in February.

Advocates say the growing number of recovery programs makes sense not just for individuals but for community colleges looking to recoup lost students. Since 2010, enrollment at two-year institutions has declined by nearly 40 percent, as more people have opted to remain in the workforce or head directly to four-year colleges, among other factors.

The downturn has pushed community colleges to broaden their approach to recruitment, resulting in an increase in the number of students requiring more support and services, said Taylor Odle, an assistant professor of education policy studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. The schools are pursuing their goals of serving more students, but the additional supports bring higher costs. “The price tag is not the same,” he said.

Schools investing in recovery programs do so without an abundance of research connecting the programs to improved student outcomes. But the data that exists is encouraging, said Noel Vest, an assistant professor of community health sciences at Boston University. A 2014 paper reviewing the impact of recovery programs, mostly at four-year colleges, found lower incidences of relapse for involved students and slightly higher GPAs and graduation rates compared to their peers overall.

Vest plans to complete a study this summer of five recovery programs, including Minneapolis College’s. He expects the findings to illuminate best practices for the programs and provide an evidence-based foundation for starting more of them. “Right now,” he said, “the data that says we must be doing this just isn’t out there.”

In the interim, advocates for the programs are using creative approaches to keep them alive and growing. At Tompkins Cortland Community College near Ithaca, New York, program leaders have forged connections with student groups on campus whose struggles with substance use might fly under the radar, such as student athletes.

In Central Michigan, the Ten16 Recovery Network is helping its clients enroll in colleges with recovery supports by providing pre-enrollment services at its out-patient treatment facilities. A client might meet with the collegiate recovery program coordinator, for example, to receive counseling about which career paths might be a good fit and which ones might present obstacles due to the client’s history with addiction and the legal system.

At Skagit Valley College, a two-year institution north of Seattle, Aaron Kirk runs the recovery program for formerly incarcerated students jointly with the school’s Breaking Free Club. (About 60 percent of people who are incarcerated struggle with substance use disorder, according to the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration.) In his role, Kirk has built a relationship with the local drug court, which offers alternative sentences to eligible individuals who commit to treatment for substance use. Typically, the sentences include a work or education component, making Skagit Valley a natural fit.

Related: Training people recovering from substance abuse disorders to be part of treatment teams

Genevieve Ward, 42, enrolled at Skagit Valley in the summer of 2021 after spending time in prison on a drug conviction. While taking coursework in human services, she used money earmarked for students in the recovery program to earn certification as a peer recovery coach. She uses the skills daily as a leader in the recovery housing where she lives near campus.

“In school, the number one struggle is that most of us don’t feel like we’re smart enough. That’s what I see the most, and what I feel the most,” she said. She credits the Breaking Free club with creating the community she and her peers need to beat back their insecurities and succeed in the classroom.

In the years leading up to her incarceration, Ward said she was living each day simply to survive. “But this college, this club, has given me hope for the future — I know that there is one.” After graduating this spring, she plans to transfer to nearby Western Washington University, where talks are underway to expand recovery supports thanks in part to advocacy from students in the Breaking Free club. Ultimately, Ward hopes to land in a career that helps people with struggles like the ones she’s faced.

For many students like Ward, community colleges’ flexible academic offerings make college possible. But the same flexibility creates obstacles to the success of on-campus groups. Options like part-time course loads, online classes, and short certificate programs can stymie consistent attendance and participation. Even for full-time students, the two-year window creates frequent turnover. “A lot of our work is student-led,” said Kirk at Skagit Valley. “It’s challenging to have these awesome leaders who graduate so quickly.”

It’s also hard to engage students in recovery programs when they don’t have the time to linger on campus. “These students are flying home from work, making dinner, getting their kids settled, then racing to get over here on time for class,” said Cheryl Kramer, recovery program advisor at Cape Cod Community College, in Massachusetts.

But the toughest scrambles are often for staff and funding. Jonathan Lofgren, a professor of addiction counseling at Minneapolis College, launched the college’s program in 2017 after a sabbatical year studying recovery on college campuses. School leaders provided a dedicated space for the program and allowed Lofgren a half day per week to manage it, but they stopped short of hiring a dedicated coordinator.

During the pandemic, the program moved online and participation dropped. Welcome news arrived in 2021, though, when the school won a state grant in collaboration with a nearby four-year university, providing funding for two paid interns, a peer recovery coach, and a coordinator, Lisa Schmid.

But amid a nationwide shortage of staff in the treatment and recovery field, the peer coach and one intern position remain vacant. In November, Schmid took extended personal leave, which left her role unfilled as well. While she was out, two student workers ensured the recovery program room stayed open, emails went out and weekly meetings happened. But broader goals, like increasing awareness of recovery support services on campus, lost steam.

When Schmid returned from leave in February, she prioritized spreading word of the program to likely partners, such as the college’s veteran services program and its admissions team. In March, Minneapolis College leaders reached an agreement with the campus health clinic to continue funding her position once the state grant runs out.

“The need is everywhere,” Schmid said. Recovery “has always been such a hush-hush thing. How do we normalize it?”

Related: ‘Waste of time’: Community college transfers derail students

Advocates hope that a percentage of the hundreds of millions of dollars in state opioid settlement funding can be earmarked for collegiate recovery, and that Congress might one day approve additional funding. President Biden’s stalled 2024 budget includes $10.8 billion for SAMHSA, of which 10 percent would be set aside for recovery support services.

In a handful of states, legislation has made for a rosier funding picture. Washington lawmakers passed a bill in 2019 that led to the creation of a state grant fund to support recovery. From that work grew the Washington State Collegiate Recovery Support Initiative, which has provided funding for eight colleges, including four community colleges, to open recovery programs or provide recovery services in pre-existing programs, like Skagit Valley’s Breaking Free club.

Patricia Maarhuis of Washington State University said that, ultimately, collegiate recovery supports are about propelling academic success. “People might say this is just another student group, but no. This is not the frosting; this is the cake. If you want your students to stay in school and do well, you need recovery supports.”

Back in Minneapolis, Badboy has found a new home for the destructive puppy and her kids are settled in good schools and daycares. She’s thriving in her classes and expects to graduate in 2025. The balancing act of family, school and recovery, for now, is stable.

Recovery is painstakingly hard, Badboy said. But her journey — more than 12 years sober after nine bouts of treatment — has created a firm structure in her life that supports college success as much as it supports her well-being. Her peers in the program understand that in a way few others can, she said, and she feels accountable to them.

“It’s made it so that I really want to do this — almost that I must do this, I have to do this,” she said. “Because other people like me, who’ve felt the same way about themselves, need to see that this is possible.”

This story about collegiate recovery programs was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.

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