Day-Care Center Searches for a New Home

A day-care center that has operated at the same Takoma Park address since 1979 is losing its home, in a holiday story with no real villain but plenty of victims.

Morgan Day Care had faced a New Year's Eve deadline to vacate its space at Takoma Park Elementary School to make room for a $15 million expansion that is about to begin. School-system officials gave the operators a one-month reprieve just before Christmas after learning they had not found a new home.

"We're not the Grinch," said Joseph Lavorgna, acting director of facilities management for Montgomery schools.

But the two Takoma Park women who founded the day care and still run it say more time may not help.

Suzanne Miller and Janette Morgan and their staff serve a population of about 100 children, most from low-income families, in a gentrifying community where retail space is scarce and rents are high. They say they are unlikely to find anything near their current address on Philadelphia Avenue that is the same size for the same rent they pay the Montgomery school system -- just under $1,500 a month. Parents fear they won't find affordable day care elsewhere in the community if Morgan Day Care closes.

School officials say that displacement of the day care serves the wider public and that expansion of Takoma Park Elementary will alleviate crowding at three neighborhood schools. The school system has offered Miller and Morgan the nearest available space at another school, but it's a few miles away at Highland Elementary School in Silver Spring, not convenient for many Morgan Day Care parents.

"Our parents can't get that far," Miller said. "It would be starting all over again."

Dominique Jones, a mother of five who lives in the nearby Park Ritchie Apartments, says she counts on dropping off her children at the day-care center at 6:45 a.m. before reporting to the U-Haul rental center where she works as a manager. Like most parents at the day-care center, Jones finds that her life plays out largely within a few miles of Philadelphia Avenue.

"I love that day care," she said. "If they close, I don't know what I'm going to do."

The morning of New Year's Eve, Miller herded a group of 10 pre-kindergarten children from one activity to the next. "We're going to do block corner today. Who wants to play block corner?"

The day care occupies classrooms in a 1968 structure that was built as an addition to the original 1919 Takoma Park school. The elementary school now occupies a newer building. School system officials want to demolish the older ones to expand the school by more than a third, to 85,000 square feet.

The driving force is crowding in the Takoma Park feeder system. Two primary-grade schools, Takoma Park and East Silver Spring elementaries, feed Piney Branch Elementary, which serves the upper-elementary grades. A complex balancing act will divert students to the Silver Spring school, which will become a K-5 facility, while Takoma Park and Piney Branch will divide the remaining students by grade level.