The Mill School, a non-profit childcare center in Woodstock’s East End, is expanding in the new year to accommodate families with children ages six weeks to five years of age.
The Vermont Department of Children and Families signed off on Dec. 19 on the licensing changes that have enabled The Mill School’s expansion, the childcare center’s founder and business manager said in an email to the Standard on Sunday.
“The Mill School previously occupied 1,000 square feet and now occupies 3,000 square feet within The Mill building [on Maxham Meadow Way],” founder Caroline Olsen wrote in the email to the Standard. “My husband, Craig, and I converted our former beverage manufacturing space into additional square footage for The Mill School. There is one [commercial condominium] between the existing space and the expansion space that [the school] hopes to eventually acquire to combine the whole center into roughly 4,000 square feet of contiguous space.” The expanded space that formerly housed the beverage-making operation includes a new indoor playground.
Olsen noted that the childcare center is actively seeking to hire additional staff in order to enroll more children as the additional space is utilized. “We are currently overstaffed for the number of children we have enrolled because we want to ensure everything is running smoothly with existing staff, children, and families as we expand before signing up too many children,” she stated. “To get to full capacity, we will need to hire an additional three full-time staff and two part-time staff,” Olsen added.
“We are [now] licensed for 40 children ages six weeks to five years, with 15 currently enrolled,” Olsen explained. “We have space for 25 more full-time children,” she concluded. “Two of those [25] spots are already committed, and we have a waitlist of 15 additional families wanting to enroll over the next year. Our hope is that the staff hiring and child enrollment line up perfectly so we can accommodate all families on our waitlist as they need care and open our doors to additional families as well.”
For more on this, please see our Dec. 31 edition of the Vermont Standard.
