A group of people walk back to the new home of the Little Peaks Preschool and Early Childhood Center in Keene on Tuesday after exploring the Dart Brook, which runs behind the center. (Enterprise photo — Lauren Yates)

KEENE — The patter of tiny feet resounded in the new home of the Little Peaks Preschool and Early Childhood Center for the first time this past Tuesday, the first notes of music that will soon fill the building for 50 weeks out of every year.

The new center was all bones on Tuesday — the exterior walls were in place, and the interior rooms and roof were outlined with two by fours — but to Little Peaks students future, present and past, the building was already a playground. Several kids ran through the building as a group of around 30 people toured the new center during an open house led by Little Peaks Executive Director Reid Jewett Smith.

As she walked through Little Peaks’ rooms with her youngest daughter strapped to her back, Jewett Smith verbally painted the picture of what the finished center will look like. The “heart” of the building will be its kitchen, she said, thanks to the vision of Little Peaks co-founder and Preschool Director Katherine Brown. While the commercial kitchen will be separated from the “warm”-feeling eating area that will have low tables for kids, Little Peaks students will have access to a dishwashing station and they’ll be able to help with basic cooking prep work like mixing up doughs. Jewett Smith hopes activities like these could encourage students from an early age to cook and clean up after themselves.

In the left wing of the center, there will be two infant-toddler rooms. Each room could accommodate up to four infants up to 18 months old and four toddlers up to 3 years old, serving a total of eight babies and eight toddlers. There will be a potty training space in that wing of the center, too.

The right wing of the center will have a room for up to 16 preschoolers from 3 to 5 years old. A second room in the right wing is what Jewett Smith called the “multi-purpose, multi-sensory room,” reserved for messy art projects, climbing on the walls and riding indoor tricycles in the winter. But the room also gives Little Peaks an opportunity for growth should the need arise; Jewett Smith said the room could act as an “overflow” area for kids of any age group.

For Jewett Smith, the main focus of the new Little Peaks property is its outdoor space. She said that kids will spend the majority of their days outside as part of the center’s nature-based curriculum. There will be two playgrounds behind the center — one for infant-toddlers and another for preschoolers — along with a pollinator garden, a vegetable garden that students will tend, and trails that will wind their way back to the Dart Brook, which runs along the back side of the center’s property.

Jewett Smith said she wants to build a lean-to next to the brook as an outdoor classroom space, and she hopes that students will one day explore the brook both when it’s frozen and when it’s babbling. That hope proved to be a promising reality on Tuesday as a few kids eagerly made their way back to the brook and started rock-hopping.

“The more time I spend here, the more times it becomes clear to me that we have so much exciting opportunity for outdoor classrooms and outdoor education back there,” Jewett Smith told the tour group on Tuesday.

Little Peaks purchased the piece of property, located across the road from the Keene Town Hall, from the Housing Assistance Program of Essex County, which still owns the adjoining lot. HAPEC is mulling over the idea of developing up to six housing units on that land, and HAPEC board member Marcy Neville said at a Keene Town Council meeting earlier this month that the program plans to have some open meetings and possibly do some surveying to see what the community wants. If a new housing project comes to fruition there, the adjoining Little Peaks and HAPEC properties would be addressing two needs identified in the town’s 2021 strategic plan: more childcare and more affordable housing for the community.

When Little Peaks — which was founded around 30 years ago — opens, it will transform from its current three-hour-a-day, fall through spring operation serving eight kids to being a full-time, licensed childcare center that operates 50 weeks per year. Jewett Smith hopes the new center will open next summer.

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A small town after all

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Little Peaks teachers Peg Wilson and Anita Sayers were walking the grounds of the new center on Tuesday, smiles spread over their faces. Sayers has been involved with Little Peaks since the beginning, and she’s not the only one who keeps coming back. She said that the new center’s general contractor, who volunteered his time to the project for a year and a half, had a daughter at Little Peaks when it first opened. Several other people from the community have offered pro bono services to help build the center — the project’s lawyers, accountants, architect, landscaper and the Little Peaks board of directors — often because they’ve had kids who attended Little Peaks.

Now, Sayers said she’s starting to see kids come through Little Peaks whose parents attended the school.

“It’s a small town after all,” Wilson sang with a laugh.

Sara Posdzich said her daughter just graduated from Little Peaks, and her son is starting up at the new center next year. Posdzich has gotten close with the teachers and formed a “tight-knit” group with other Little Peaks parents, and she believes the new center will make the community “that much better.”

“It’s nice that the community actually wants to invest in these little lives that are going to carry on the community later on,” she said.

The new center’s speedy progress is largely thanks to community donors. Two locals provided a $750,000 seed fund — which has now grown to $1.4 million — to kickstart the center’s capital project, and part-time Keene Valley resident Annette Merle-Smith provided $500,000 to start an endowment fund to ensure that families of all incomes can send their kids to the center. Jewett Smith hopes that Little Peaks can build the endowment fund up to $3 million, which would be used to subsidize tuition for low-income families to give kids from all socioeconomic positions access to the same academic foundations.

Thanks to these donations, Jewett Smith said the building will be solar-powered and have EV charging stations, have a healthy foods program that sources ingredients from local farms, and have a building filled with completely natural design elements that are chemical-free, plastic-free and safe for kids.

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Times they are a-changin’

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When asked how they got involved with Little Peaks, both Wilson and Sayers pointed to Katherine Brown, the center’s preschool director. Brown was one of the founders of Little Peaks around 30 years ago, and Jewett Smith has called Brown the “north star” of Little Peaks’ environmentally-aligned programming at the new center.

Brown said that when she moved to Keene with her 3-year-old in the early 1990s, she couldn’t find a preschool. She decided to get together with a bunch of parents who also needed childcare, and Little Peaks was born.

Brown said the center started out with half-day operations two days a week, and that worked for people at the time. But as time went on, she said, more and more families needed more robust childcare. She said the new Little Peaks center is an exciting “outgrowth” of that shift.

Sayers also noted this shift, saying that back when Little Peaks started, there were more parents who had a job they could leave for a few years to take care of their kids. These days, she said, there are more couples that both have jobs — sometimes multiple jobs — and they need a center that can watch over their kids for an entire work day.

Angela Smith, whose son Beckham graduated from Little Peaks this past year, said she had to leave her job this summer to take care of Beckham since Little Peaks, in its current capacity, doesn’t run through the summer months. She also noted that the last two years have been especially difficult as she’s had to balance work and taking care of Beckham throughout the coronavirus pandemic. She believes the new Little Peaks center will help address these difficulties for other parents.

“This is needed for the community, but also for parents’ mental health,” she said. “Little Peaks is an amazing program, but a half a day is a struggle — to work and do half a day and get them (the kids) socialized.”

Brown said her 3-year-old is now 32, but after years of teaching grades K-6 in public schools, she returned to Little Peaks as a teacher five years ago. She’s excited about the center’s “continuity of care” model, which will allow kids to stay with one teacher for a few years at a time as they move through Little Peaks. Brown said she’s passionate about early childhood education, and the children are what make the experience meaningful for her.

“What keeps me coming back is the families and the children,” she said. “They make it fun. If you feel grumpy in the morning, you go to school and they cheer you right up.”