One big family: Camp Ripley opens its first full-time day care

LITTLE FALLS, Minn. - Camp Ripley’s newest recruits are some of the smallest in the military base’s 90-year history.

Day care centers, a first for the Minnesota National Guard, are opening in the heart of the sprawling 53,000-acre training facility outside Little Falls.

Through the gates, past the guards, stands a row of sturdy base housing that is being converted to full-time child care. Camp Ripley has worked for months to renovate and childproof the facility, fence off secure outdoor play areas and line up child care providers. The result, they joke, may be Minnesota’s most secure day care.

Inside the first facility to open, preschoolers roam the colorful playroom, pushing toy trucks underfoot, checking out the window occasionally to see if mommy is coming. Nearby, babies napped contentedly, ignoring the happy babble.

The Department of Defense offers a range of child care subsidies and services to military families and a growing number of bases have facilities on site. But carving out space on a military base for babies and swing sets requires an investment of time, effort and base resources. But it was a much-needed service Camp Ripley could offer the people serving this country.

“The Minnesota National Guard and the Army, in general, are just moving toward family-first,” said 1st Lt. Colton Rossow, Camp Ripley’s public affairs officer, crouching to admire a toy truck one of the youngsters wanted to show off. “We understand that our soldiers care about their families, and we care about our soldiers.”

Camp Ripley needed child care providers who could accommodate the schedules of military parents, from long days to weekends when duty calls but the babysitter calls in sick.

Camp Ripley needed people like Nicole Rhode and Karissa Gross.

“They really do care about the families here,” said Rhode, owner of Little Wonders Academy, the first child care facility to open on base. Two families with infants registered almost instantly. Next door, where Karissa Gross Family Childcare is preparing to open in a few weeks, two families have enrolled babies that haven’t even been born yet.

Working with the National Guard, she said, has been “a wonderful collaborative adventure.”

Finding good child care can be an ordeal, here and everywhere. Parents on base — who may have been cobbling a child care schedule across multiple babysitters, relatives and drop-in day cares — are now minutes away from a bright, cheery facility where they can check in on their children or nurse their babies.

On weekend deployments to Camp Ripley, which sits about half an hour north and west of St. Cloud, parents will be able to line up Saturday child care. Peace of mind for the parents, and for the kids, a chance to see a decommissioned tank at the front gates.

Eventually, there will be three day care facilities on the base. Getting them up and running in a handful of months required National Guard-level logistical skills and the help of the entire community. Families started donating toys and games while the houses were still empty shells. Now they’re full of bright decorations, toddler-scale furniture, trucks, dolls and blocks.

If you really want to make a toddler or a parent in the Minnesota National Guard smile, Gross and Rhode both have Amazon wish lists to finish furnishing their day care spaces.