From cubicles to cribs: Lima’s Mercy Tots child care center repurposes office space

LIMA — Children swinging from jungle gyms, laughing during story time, hanging their newest creation on a nearby wall — that’s a typical day at Mercy Tots child care center in Lima, Ohio.

The $3 million child care center was once an office supply store and, before that, a roller rink. 

Mercy Health, a healthcare provider with hospitals and primary care offices across the state, owns and operates the center on the first floor. The center currently serves 75 children ages six weeks to 5 years old, with a license to serve up to 104. 

Although Mercy Tots is primarily geared towards Mercy Health employees and prioritizes their families, the center also accepts children from the surrounding community.

In fact, only about 40 percent of children at Mercy Tots come from Mercy Health employee families.

This strategic move to help the hospital’s workers has been a long time coming. 

“I’ve been with the hospital for 25 years, and we’ve been talking about a daycare for 25 years,” Mercy Health Director of Operations Aimee Kuhlman said.

“We could just never find the right place because we don’t have room for it on campus. The Perry family, who owned this building before giving it to us, did a lot of stuff for the community.”

Kuhlman said the Perrys gifted Mercy Health the building with the goal that the hospital would give back to the community.

“The family was absolutely over the moon about the idea of a daycare coming here,” the director said.

“Because it’s not just Mercy Health employees, we are open to the community as well.”

After receiving the gift three years ago, and about a year of construction, Mercy Health opened Mercy Tots this past September.

Yet, the road to opening was a bumpy one. 

From zoning changes and other renovations to unforeseen hurdles popping up after opening, the child care workers have overcome or are overcoming challenges every day.

Zoning, construction and licensing

For the center to meet the zoning and code requirements for a child care center, workers gutted the entire first floor and started from the ground up. 

The Department of Children and Youth, which oversees child care operations in Ohio, mandates that classrooms have 35 square feet of space per child.

“HVAC, heating, fire alarm; everything [had to be renovated, too],” Kuhlman said.

“We [had to add] like 31 cameras from inside all the rooms, through the facility, out on the playground and in the parking lot that are all monitored by Mercy Health campus police.”

The building was located in a business zone. Since Mercy Tots moved in, it has changed to a child care zone.

However, Mercy Tots’ manager Andrea Stout said there aren’t a lot of differences between Lima’s requirements for those two zones.

“What is uniquely different is that Ohio licensing from the Department of Children and Youth (DCY) has its own criteria you have to follow as well.”

Funding this project

Mercy Tots cost Mercy Health around $3 million to get up and running.

But the child care center founders had some help via grants and community volunteers’ fundraising efforts.

“[Volunteers from the hospital] will have a craft show and other events to raise money,” Kuhlman said. 

“Each year, they dedicate that money to something that’s going on within the hospital. So, the volunteers contributed $150,000 specifically for the playground equipment.”

Other local contractors also donated to Mercy’s project. Kuhlman is in the process of making a donor wall to remember and thank the community for its generosity.

“We do have another grant that we’re working on with the state of Ohio that’s actually given us some decent amounts of money,” Kuhlman said.

“But truth be told, we’re not here to make money. This is more of a retention and recruiting tool for the hospital, but we’d like to not be in the hole.”

Stout agreed.

“If you’re in [child care] for profit, for a large profit, then you’re not in it for the right reasons,” she said.

Stout said the center Mercy has built is something that most child care workers only dream of. Having state-of-the-art equipment instead of hand-me-downs, as many other centers do, is huge.

“The amount of donors who contributed — we are extremely grateful for how the community pulled together to make this a reality,” Stout added.

“It’s not a money maker.”

Who is served at Mercy Tots?

Stout said infant care is such a huge need in the area that the waitlist is growing rapidly.

“I think we are the only center in this area that has space for 20 infants, and that is a huge, huge need,” she said.

Kuhlman pointed out that every infant currently in Mercy Tots’ care has one child behind them to fill their spot. There’s a waitlist on top of that.

“Around here, most daycares, if they’re decent, will have a three- four-year waiting list just to get in,” Kuhlman said.

The pair also briefly mentioned how a lot of centers around the area don’t start accepting children until 18 months of age.

This is because it’s easier for centers to meet DCY’s requirements for that age group, Stout explained.

Mercy Tots is open from 6 a.m. to 8 p.m. to help accommodate health care employees, who often work those 12-hour shifts.

Mercy Health’s St. Rita Medical Center employs nearly 3,000 people. But medical professionals aren’t the only ones who struggle to find care due to the nature of shift work.

Ford Motor Company’s Lima Engine Plant, Joint Systems Manufacturing Center (Army tank plant), Guardian Energy’s ethanol plant and Procter & Gamble’s manufacturing facility are all based in the area.

“This allows families to be able to drop their children off and not have to worry about, can grandma get them, or some other solution,” Stout said.

What does it cost to send my kid to Mercy Tots?

Other local centers closing and Mercy Tots’ staff

While Mercy Tots is flourishing, two long-time child care centers both closed their doors on the Friday before the former opened.

Rhodes State College operated a daycare at the local YMCA for several years and later turned to Kuhlman when it made the decision to close.

“We worked together so that we could transfer any of their families that needed to over to us if they wanted to,” Kuhlman said.

“We have a couple of their former employees, too.”

New Creative Learning was in business for 40 years before it closed on the same day as Rhodes’ center.

Mercy Tots employs between 25 to 30 people at the moment. Kuhlman expects to hire more as enrollment increases.

“We’ve been adding teachers as we add kids and we’re at a pretty good place now,” Kuhlman said.

“They’re not all full-time employees, though we do have a significant amount of full-time employees; some are part-time, some are PRN (on-call, as-needed).”

Mercy Tots also partners with local career tech schools and colleges, allowing students studying early childhood education to get hands-on experience while offering the center the benefit of extra help.

What’s next for the center?

Now that the center is up and running, Stout and Kuhlman’s primary goals are to continue building relationships and trust between staff, children and families.

“Including travel time, at a minimum, your child may be here nine hours. That is a lot of waking hours that a child is not in a parent’s care,” Stout said.

“So, trust building and being a partner in that relationship is really important to us.”

That’s why the center displays family art projects in its lobby.

“We do a family project (each) month, where we ask the parents to sit down with their children and just take a few minutes and do something creative together,” Stout explained.

“I think sometimes in our world today, we forget about joining each other at the dinner table because we’re running off to sporting events or whatever.”

“So, it’s one of those times where we just stop, reflect and talk about the simple stuff and ask, ‘What colors do you want to use?'”

“It seems so simple, but that’s a part of that trust building that we’re looking for.”