January 15, 2024
Helena Public School Board of Trustees approves lease agreement for local health care system to occupy Ray Bjork Learning Center, considerably expanding capacity for employee child care program
On Tuesday, January 9, the Helena Public School Board of Trustees unanimously agreed to lease terms granting St. Peter’s Health employee child care facility, Pete’s Place, to occupy Ray Bjork Learning Center located at 1600 8th Avenue in Helena. The retired 22,000 square foot elementary school located blocks from the Regional Medical Center brings additional capacity to serve up to 240 children, based on programming and staffing availability.
In August of 2023, the Helena Public School Board selected St. Peter’s Health to enter lease negotiations for Ray Bjork Learning Center. According to St. Peter’s Health Chief Operating Officer Brian Lee, St. Peter's has dedicated years to finding a solution to improve access to child care for its employees and the Helena community.
“Ray Bjork Learning Center emerged as a perfect, more cost-effective solution to expand our onsite or near-campus child care operations rather than a new build we’ve considered previously,” said Lee. “We’re very fortunate for this partnership with the Helena School District and feel this is a win-win-win solution for our staff, the school district and our community.”
St. Peter’s intends to occupy Ray Bjork by August 1, spending the next few months making renovations to the building to meet specific child care licensing requirements. The original Pete’s Place facility located on the main campus at St. Peter’s will relocate to the Ray Bjork building just blocks away, tripling its footprint with more classrooms and adding a gymnasium, playground and expanded garden area.
In 2022, St. Peter’s acquired Creative Horizons Learning Center on the north side of Helena, now called Pete's Place North, as a first step to addressing child care access for St. Peter’s employees. Between the two facilities, currently Pete’s Place is licensed to care for 146 children. Yet many St. Peter’s families have remained on child care waiting lists.
A 2020 special publication by the Montana Department of Labor and Industry reported 62% of parents with young children reported missing work due to a lack of child care, and approximately 45% of Montana businesses with non-traditional hours reported that the child care shortage was impacting their ability to recruit or retain qualified workers.
“As one of the largest private employers in Helena with nearly 1,800 staff members, we knew we needed to be at the table to help address the child care shortage in our community,” says St. Peter’s Health Chief Executive Officer Wade Johnson. “Expanding child care services not only aligns with our people-first philosophy and values as an organization, it helps us build and keep the workforce we need to serve our growing community and ever-increasing patient demand for high quality health and wellness services.”
St. Peter’s is grateful for the generous support of St. Peter’s Health Foundation donors who have been instrumental in helping fund Pete's Place expansion plans. Current and expected major gift contributions, in addition to the $1 million dollar ARPA Childcare Innovation and Infrastructure Grant awarded to St. Peter’s in 2022 by the Montana Department of Public Health and Human Services (DPHHS), will minimize the financial impact on St. Peter's capital budget, ensuring the health system’s investment in childcare and workforce solutions remains strong.
St. Peter’s work in early childhood learning and development to identify problems and solutions goes beyond expansion of our child care services. In addition to helping solve the child care shortage and in collaboration with a number of community partners, St. Peter’s serves as the project lead for the Zero to Five Early Childhood Coalition of the Greater Helena Area with generous funding provided by the Trustees of the Headwaters Foundation.