MCMC’s Great ‘N Small turns 40

When GnS was founded, it was originally in a modular unit on the hospital campus, but was moved in January 1990 to 1719 E. 19th St., right across from the hospital. This location had originally been a house purchased by the hospital to help provide temporary and transitional housing for new physicians coming into town, but it was remodeled to suit its new purpose.

The house next door, 1711 E. 19th St., was also a rental owned by the hospital that, in 2004, was remodeled to serve as another building for GnS, as demand continued to grow, Kendrick said. One building is used for infants and toddlers, and the other is for children preschool- and school-aged.

“We are licensed, and always have been, from six weeks through 12 years,” she said. “We have a full preschool program that we run mid-September through toward the end of May. So employees can have their children get preschool services, as well as childcare without having to run and use their breaks to take them to different places.”

Additionally, Kendrick said that the proximity can be really helpful for breastfeeding and overall bonding with a baby, as parents are able to use their breaks to spend time with their child.

“Even for older kids, sometimes parents will come and pick them up and take them for an ice cream and bring them back, or spend a break with them outside,” she said.

GnS is also different from a lot of other childcare options because of its long hours, Kendrick said. They are open from 6:30 a.m. to 7:45 p.m. Monday through Friday. This isn’t just beneficial to parents and children, she said, but also to college students doing their practicum.

“We’re one of the few places that offer 12-month care, which has been really valuable to a lot of students,” Kendrick said. “… That has been a big support to the community for those practicum students to have access to practicum hours that maybe wouldn’t fit into the traditional academic year.”

Kendrick has worked at GnS for 38 years and has served as director for 35 of those, which means she has seen a lot of change in her time at the program. However, some of the biggest change has come in the last few years with the COVID-19 pandemic, she said.

One of the most interesting changes has been the change in attitude toward childcare, Kendrick said.

“Although there were a lot of negative things about the pandemic, one of the things that helped our profession is for our society to value childcare in a greater capacity than our society has valued childcare and early education in the past,” she said.

In her time being involved with childcare, Kendrick said people very often were somewhat dismissive of her career compared to that of her husband, who worked in public education.

“As an example, years ago when we would go on vacation and be visiting with people from out of state or something like that, they would say, ‘What do you do?’ And they would talk to my husband, and he would say, ‘Well, I’m a music teacher, and I teach K through five,’ and they would give him all this positive feedback and energy,” she said. “And then they would say, ‘Do you work outside the home? What do you do?’ And I would say, Well, I’m a director for early childcare, and we have  preschool and early education programs,’ and they would just say, ‘Oh.’ It would be like, conversation over.”

With the positive changes have also come more difficult ones. Currently, the vast majority of those enrolled in the program are children of direct hospital employees, which are also the only people currently able to enroll. In the past, there was a tiered pricing system that allowed community members to enroll for a higher cost, but due to the pandemic, those services are no longer available.

“That was really difficult,” Kendrick said. “Some of those folks we’d had relationships with for a really long time.”

The change was necessary, however, as the pandemic was a huge challenge for GnS as there was more need for childcare than ever for essential workers such as healthcare workers, Kendrick said.

“Over the pandemic, there were many childcare facilities or people who did childcare in their home that were unable to continue to do that with all the strict regulations,” she said. “They were, unfortunately, just not able to operate or were put out of business. We had to apply for an emergency status and follow all of those regulations, but we were able to stay open to be able to support the frontline workers through the pandemic.”

One such regulation was that children had to be in stable groups, with no mixing or switching of students between groups.

“What was really painful for us, as caregivers who worked here a long time, was to see the kids grieving, not being able to play with some of their best friends,” Kendrick said. “That was really heart-wrenching for my staff, because the kids would literally cry to play with their really good friends that they saw across the fence.”

It wasn’t just the younger kids that presented a challenge though. In fact, older kids provided an even larger difficulty: Online schooling.

“As a licensing requirement, we did not have to support distance learning as part of providing emergency childcare,” Kendrick said. “However, we knew that, especially with the clientele that we have, many of the nurses were working 12-hour shifts, and people were working long days. There was no way that they were going to have time to do the distance learning. So as a support to our families, and to our students, and to the employees, we provided that.”

The most difficult thing about helping children through online learning was how many different schools were represented in the children that attended GnS. There were students from both Washington and Oregon, and even within communities, different schools used different programs. According to Kendrick, she once counted and found there were at least 15 different platforms being used for distance learning that GnS employees had to learn.

What was even worse was that each school had a different schedule, Kendrick said.

“We literally had timers with kids’ names on them,” she said. “They would start school at different times, they would be broken out into two main classrooms. We had kindergarten through second in one classroom and then in another building, we had the other half of second grade through fifth grade. So we had to set all these timers for, ‘Okay, you’re on recess. Now you get to go play quietly over in this corner for 10 minutes, and then you need to come back and you need to log on, and you need to do this and you need to do that.’ And it was like we had this huge wall that had every school schedule on it and then each child’s schedule. It was a logistical nightmare.”

What’s incredible about their work through the pandemic was that it wasn’t something GnS had to do at all, Kendrick said.

“My staff did not have to do that,” she said. “But they did it to show their commitment to their jobs, to this community, to the parents and the children. They helped them with homework, they sat next to them, they coached them, they got them caught up if they got behind and overwhelmed, they encouraged them … It was really tricky but my staff, they did an amazing job, truly.”