‘A huge step forward in restoring child care access on Hatteras Island’: Dare commissioners allocate $35K to nonprofit opening facility

Heather Jennette and Pastor Amanda Hedden are two of the parents who have worked to establish a nonprofit to open a child care facility on Hatteras Island. They smile after the Dare County Board of Commissioners allocated up to $35,000 toward the efforts on Monday, Aug. 10, 2026. (Photo by Corinne Saunders)

By Corinne Saunders

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MANTEO — Hatteras Island parent and child care advocate Heather Jennette said she wishes the child care center she and other local parents have been planning opened “yesterday—six months ago, ideally.”

Still, she shared appreciation after the Dare County Board of Commissioners voted 7-0 on Monday, Aug. 10, in Manteo to allocate up to $35,000 to the new nonprofit Coastal Family Collaborative to cover the planned Tidal Tots Childcare Center’s first year of rent and a bit more.

“I think it’s a huge step forward in restoring child care access on Hatteras Island,” Jennette said, standing outside the commissioners’ meeting room after the vote, alongside Pastor Amanda Hedden, who is also involved in the efforts.

“In the next couple weeks, you’ll start to see our name out there and get the hiring process going,” Jennette said, with Coastal Family Collaborative’s goal being to “get kids and teachers in the classrooms as soon as possible.”

She said they hope for an opening date of no later than Jan. 1, 2027.

Outer Banks Insider broke the news in August 2025 that the approximately 50-mile-long Hatteras Island would soon have no year-round licensed child care facilities, detailing how the planned closure of Little Sprouts Child Care in Frisco due to staffing difficulties underscored persistent local child care challenges.

Since Little Sprouts’ December closure, “families have been left trying to piece together child care however we can,” Jennette told commissioners during their Aug. 3 meeting, when she’d asked for $125,000 in startup funding on behalf of the Coastal Family Collaborative.

“Sometimes…we rely on grandparents and friends,” she continued. “We’ve reduced work hours, some parents have had to leave the workforce altogether, employers are struggling to recruit and retain employees—and mostly we’re left making impossible decisions with the precious members of our family.”

Erin Trant, a mother of three young children—including twin toddlers—told Outer Banks Insider in a phone call that she left her job as the office manager of a real estate company around March, when the seasonal business she and her husband own picked up. Finding replacement child care after Little Sprouts closed was too pricey, but she hopes to return to her former job once Tidal Tots opens.

Trant, Jennette and Hedden are founding members of the new nonprofit, she said. Hedden will be part of the seven-member board, while she and Jennette will be “overseeing” the board “just to get everybody moving forward.”

Their goal, beyond the opening of the new center, is to make the business plan readily available so that any other group can use it and more quickly open other new child care facilities, she noted.

“It has been a very long process, and we have put in the work to make this a viable solution for our community,” Trant said.

Trant said she and other parents at the center received a letter in July 2025 about Little Sprouts’ planned October closure, and they worked with commissioners and Dare County Manager and Attorney Bobby Outten to “extend until the end of the year, a couple more months, to try to figure out child care.”

Commissioners on Oct. 6 unanimously voted to use $3,000 from the county’s contingency fund for the Little Sprouts operator to pay staff and keep the center open through Dec. 19.

“We contacted them and graciously they agreed to hold it open,” Outten said at the October meeting. “However, in order for him to convince his workers who had already told they were going to close down to stay on until [December] the 19th, he had to pay them a bonus, and that bonus was about $3,000.”

The group of Hatteras Island mothers since last summer have been involved in exploring various child care models, agreeing on and launching a nonprofit to run the facility and detailing a business plan.

The planned center will open in the building that formerly housed Little Sprouts in Frisco, Jennette and Trant each said.

“I’ve learned more about child care than I ever have wanted to, but just for the sustainability of our community long-term, you know, economically, socially, educationally…childcare is such an important part of that picture,” Trant said.

“Everywhere in the United States is having a child care crisis,” she said. “Without child care, you don’t have communities that are thriving.”

According to the plan shared with commissioners, the center will be licensed to care for 30 children from birth through age 5, and it will employ five full-time employees and one half-time employee. The center will have a $375,000 annual operating budget and will charge a monthly tuition of approximately $1,100.

The Tidal Tots Childcare Center will have a $1.3 million annual impact “supporting local workforce participation, employer retention and year-round stability,” according to the plan.

Jennette told commissioners on Aug. 10 that the North Carolina Rural Center already awarded the new nonprofit a $50,000 grant, which is typically disbursed equally over two years.

“Given the urgency and scope of what we are trying to do, they have indicated that they would be agreeable to giving us all the money upfront,” she said.

During commissioners’ Aug. 3 meeting, Jennette said the group just a few days prior put out a call for letters from folks leaving the island because of child care challenges and received 27 letters “from parents, business owners, foster families—people who have already left our community because of this.”

She noted, “The need is there, the outcry is there; and that’s why we’re here.”

Following that meeting, an ad hoc committee including Dare commissioners Mary Ellon Ballance and Rob Ross, along with Outten and Matt Motyka, Dare County’s chief financial officer, met with parent representatives for the nonprofit.

“As in many businesses, there’s an early cash flow challenge but once that is met the ongoing sustainability and health of the business is not in jeopardy,” Outten said at the Aug. 10 meeting. “That’s what gave me confidence to say, yeah this this looks like something we can and ought to do for daycare and Hatteras Island, which we’ve all known to be a very big issue.”

“It definitely is something that is needed, and I applaud their efforts at getting it to where they have, because they meet monthly, sometimes bimonthly, to try to get this going,” Commissioner Mary Ellon Ballance, who represents Hatteras Island, said before the vote.

Heather Jennette (standing) concludes her remarks to the Dare County Board of Commissioners at its special meeting on Monday, Aug. 10, 2026, in Manteo. (Screenshot of Dare County livestream)

Commissioner Rob Ross said that after that in-person meeting with the group, he was satisfied with both their business plan and their commitment level.

“It gave me a sense of these folks really are committed to and serious about making this work for their community,” Ross said.

“My only concern moving forward is what a slippery slope this is,” Commissioner Carson Creef said before the vote, noting the existence of hundreds of nonprofits across the county. “How do we value one nonprofit over another other I guess is what I’m asking today.”

Ballance responded that the nonprofit has gotten the support of the community behind it to serve a need. She added: “The ones the ones that have come before us, we have tried in every way to help.”

Children & Youth Partnership for Dare County (CYP), a Manteo-based nonprofit that makes child care referrals and assists child care providers in the county, is enthusiastic about supporting the new endeavor, according to its executive director.

“We are encouraged to see a new local nonprofit forming to address this need and are excited to support the Coastal Family Collaborative’s efforts to restore access to child care on Hatteras Island,” CYP Executive Director Sara Sampson told Outer Banks Insider in an email.

“Access to high-quality early childhood education is essential because it supports children’s healthy development, while it helps parents stay in the workforce and strengthens our local economy,” Sampson said.

Dare County currently has 22 licensed child care programs, having lost a licensed family child care home in Kill Devil Hills since last year, in addition to Little Sprouts, according to Sampson.

“The greatest area of need for child care is for Hatteras Island, where there is currently no year-around full-time child care available,” Sampson said. “We also continue to see a need for infant and toddler care throughout the county.” 

Recent data shows that approximately 1,264 Dare County children under age 6 live in a household where the sole parent or both parents are working, according to Sampson.

However, she said only about 375 children birth to age 5 are enrolled in licensed child care programs in Dare County, with an additional roughly 200 school-age children typically served through the after-school program at Dare County Schools.

A state directory of child care facilities by county is available at https://ncchildcare.ncdhhs.gov/Parent.

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