A daycare center that serves about 100 students in the Center Grove area will close in December.
Honey Grove Educational Centers opened its location near Center Grove High School in 2015, but a project to expand the high school means parents and students will have to look elsewhere for their childcare needs. The daycare’s only other location is in Bargersville.
In March, Center Grove schools notified the daycare center they would have to close their doors to make room for the new construction. Keeping the building open during construction would be too costly, as there are numerous utilities that run through the site that will need to be relocated and the larger footprint of the high school would eventually render keeping the building open in perpetuity impossible, said Jason Taylor, Center Grove’s assistant superintendent of human resources and technology.
“It would be demolished at the end of the (2022-23) school year,” Taylor said. “There are a number of utilities that run through that site that would have to be relocated for the high school. It’s too complicated and costly. We wouldn’t want to put $500,000 into a building that we’re going to tear down six months later.”
Several school districts including Center Grove and Clark-Pleasant use the Honey Grove’s before and after school program. The program is run from local school buildings and not at the daycare center, so it will not be interrupted by the construction, Taylor said.
About 60 of the 100 current students will still be in preschool this fall, and those students will have a spot at the Bargersville location, as is the case with the about 30 employees, said Adam McClurg, Honey Grove Educational Centers’ vice president.
In order to accommodate the influx of students and staff members, Honey Grove officials plan to consider an expansion of the Bargersville building. Those plans have not been finalized yet, he said.
“We’re looking at options to try and create as much space as possible and provide as many options as we can for families,” McClurg said. “The number one priority is to create relationships with these families, so we’re doing what we can to try and help them out. As far as what’s going to happen to them, everyone currently in our program will be offered a spot.”
McClurg said news of the Center Grove building closing came earlier than he expected.
“We did what we could to develop a plan after finding this information out and communicated we wanted to have this information out and let everyone know so they could make a decision,” he said. “We knew it was going to happen at some point. We had talked about it pre-COVID or right around COVID time. It happened quicker than expected but we knew it would happen.”
