Additional reporting by Andy Trinh
After nearly 20 years of serving the New College of Florida and its neighboring communities, the New College Childcare Center (NCCC) was expelled from campus this past May by the New College administration. Relations between the daycare and the college had been amicable for most of the NCCC’s history, but the sudden change in administration harkened a sudden break with precedent. New College officials threatened to end their lease with little more than a month’s notice and argued that the NCCC’s existence went against Florida law. They offered no alternative for the parents whose children attended the daycare, parents who in large part were members of New College faculty. The administration’s hostility put the NCCC’s finances in a precarious position; as a result, the childcare failed to raise the funds necessary to relocate off campus. New College faculty will have to find some other daycare provisions for their children.
The NCCC began as the shared dream of four New College faculty members, all of whom were expecting their first child in the summer of 2002. Professor of Sociology Sarah Hernández was one of those four faculty members.
“Obviously, we were anticipating that we were going to need a place to take the kids to, and this idea came that at least we already had four people [at the college] who would be needing daycare … Why not start a daycare?” Hernández recalled.
After years of planning and negotiating, the New College administration agreed to buy a house near campus on neighboring 58th Street in 2006 for the purpose of hosting the NCCC, with one condition.
“The leadership at the time were like, ‘No way, we don’t want to be responsible for daycare,’” Hernández said. “The financial officer of the time was saying that he had been in another institution where they had a daycare, it was a nightmare, and he doesn’t want to go into the daycare business.”
Rather than throwing in the towel, Hernández and the three other professors dreamed a little bigger: What if they made their own organization?
It would need to be an entirely separate entity, with its own board, insurance and employees. Hernández remembered the administration at the time using the word “firewall” to describe the barrier between New College and the potential daycare. So Hernández and her colleagues, in spite of the additional work of raising their first children, added even more to their workload, spending four years building the NCCC up, brick by bureaucratic brick.
“I was actually the one that filed and filled out all the forms … that was a lot, a lot, a lot of work,” she said. “All that bureaucratic work, filling out forms, explaining things to justify that we are a non-profit — that includes building the non-profit organization bylaws, governing body and how we would be functioning.
”We created it as an LLC, and then decided that the process of the decision-making of the organization would be done cooperatively, democratically, with all the parents as members,” Hernández continued.
The toughest part of the process was the insurance.
“At that point,” she added, “I learned that another group of faculty had earlier tried to do this, and it was the insurance that killed the project … But once we managed to get liability insurance, then it was clear to the college that we were very serious,” she said. “We had everything set up for the organization, and we had the insurance. It was really very hard for the college now to say no.”
So, the college said yes, and then some. Beyond providing a house for the NCCC to operate out of, New College also renovated it to meet the certification requirements for a daycare.
“The college really turned out to be a lot more generous than I would’ve anticipated,” Hernández said, “And that was really delightful.”
After four years of planning and prodding, the NCCC was up and running. By that time, the first four kids who served as the catalyst for the childcare’s creation were too old to attend, but a second generation of children soon populated the house on 58th Street. They were the first of nearly 20 cohorts of children to spend their weekdays at the NCCC. As the center grew, so too did its clientele. A few years later, the childcare opened its doors to families outside of New College’s employ, becoming a fixture of the broader Sarasota community, as families from the scores of neighboring suburbs found they had a new childcare center right in their backyard.
The daycare was such a hit that New College began featuring it on tours given to potential hires, showing off their on-campus, parent-run childcare in an attempt to coax academics into accepting faculty positions. Former Professor of Mathematics Chris Kottke recounted his experience as one such potential hire:
“They were like, ‘We’ve got this, it’s right here on campus,’ and that was a big draw for me,” Kottke said. “When we moved, I had a two-year-old, and my daughter had not yet been born, so I immediately enrolled my two-year-old there, and it was great. I lived in the Uplands neighborhood just to the north, and to be able to walk from my office, pick up my kid at daycare and then walk home was amazing. It was a huge perk.”
Kottke joined NCF in 2016. Like all parents whose kids attended the NCCC, Kottke was immediately included in the governance of the non-profit. An enthusiastic participant, he would go on to join the board of the NCCC, eventually serving as board chair for six years.
“I have some of the fondest, warmest memories of the childcare center,” Kottke said, “I think it benefited my kids greatly. They loved all their teachers at all different levels … Certainly, being involved in the management and organization of it came with challenging and stressful times, but it was all worth it.
“They were extremely well prepared for kindergarten,” he continued. “I mean, the center had kind of a reputation — all the graduates from that preschool program would go into the advanced work classes in the local elementary schools. You go to the advanced work kindergarten class, and it’s like half of them are just whoever graduated from the NCCC.”
Years passed. Kottke’s kids graduated from the NCCC. Kottke left the board. Then the political takeover began in 2023. For a while, the NCCC managed to fly under the radar. After all, the mandate of the incoming administration had little to do with whether or not the college allowed the NCCC to continue operating on campus. The 2023/24 Master Plan did call for the demolition of the house the NCCC was based in, but so had previous master plans.
“People at the center were always aware of that, even with prior administrations,” Kottke explained. “We’ve always understood that, long term, that house on 58th Street wasn’t going to be there. But we felt like, maybe the center could keep operating in there until they had the master plan in place, and the capital funding to do whatever development they were going to do. And so, at the point when they need to knock it down and clear the land, at that point, the center could move out.”
The first real sign of trouble came after the 58th Street connector had been constructed. Prior to the connector, 58th Street was a dead end, and commuting to the President’s office in Cook Hall meant driving down College Drive, on the opposite side of campus. But once the connector was completed, commutes to Cook Hall could now follow a more direct path by driving down 58th Street instead. It was on one of these commutes down 58th Street, on one of the last days of the 2023 fall semester, that New College President Richard Corcoran witnessed a lot of trash on the NCCC’s front lawn.
“There was sufficient demand for infant care that the center wanted to open up a new room and be able to provide care for zero-to-one year-olds,” Kottke explained. “There wasn’t another room in that house, but they proposed renovating the garage. So the center talked with the college, and initially there was support for that.
“Around that time the center was getting ready for this renovation, they had been using the garage as storage,” he continued. “So they moved all this stuff in the garage out to the curb for trash pickup. And at that time — this is my understanding from what President Corcoran told me when I was discussing the center with him — he drove past, because now he could drive from College Hall down 58th Street, and saw all this trash out on the curb and became upset about it and called Facilities and said, ‘What’s this building with all this trash out front?’ And they were like, ‘Oh, that’s the childcare center, we’re not operating out of it.’ And he got all upset about it. And basically from that point on, he’s been trying to get rid of the center.”
After the trash sighting, the stance of the administration shifted from apathetic to openly hostile. The administration began to threaten kicking the NCCC off campus. “That was when I rejoined the board,” Kottke explained, “and when parents at the center and staff at the center were kind of nervous about the future of it.” Since the lease automatically renewed in June 2024, the NCCC figured that they at least had another school year before they could actually be removed—until the administration sent the center a notice that they needed to clear out and vacate the space by August 1st, 2024.
NCCC Director Saran DeVaughn said throughout this whole process, Corcoran never met with her once.
“I’m sorry that the President felt that way,” she said, “I’m also sorry that the President never came to talk to me or came to say anything to me.”
Other members of the administration met with DeVaughn in the president’s stead, such as Chief of Staff Christie Fitz-Patrick, who stopped by shortly after Corcoran’s grievances began.
“She wanted to know, did we have a lease, she wanted to know what our curriculum was, which was all a fish to find out what we had going on, because they knew at that point they were going to try to shut us down.
“But her and the General Counsel are the only people that I have spoken to from New College, and it wasn’t a very pleasant meeting,” DeVaughn said. “They talked to my board members. They wouldn’t even make eye contact with me.”
If the administration had their way, the daycare would have shut down halfway through 2024, with just over a month’s notice to go from planning for the next school year to vacating the premises.
“We were prepared to go to court if that was what it took,” Kottke said. “Eventually they stood down and let the lease go on for the rest of the year.”
Luckily for the NCCC and its community, even if there was a “firewall” between the college and NCCC, faculty had another way of defending one of their job’s most treasured benefits: the faculty union. A few years after the NCCC began, faculty voted to ensure the existence of the NCCC by writing it into their collective bargaining agreement (CBA) with the college.
While the old CBA language ensured the existence of the NCCC, negotiations for a new contract were just around the corner. During negotiations, the wording of the clause concerning childcare benefits was edited. The NCCC was protected explicitly until the end of June 2025, at which point, “the College may in its discretion operate or cause to be operated a childcare center on or near the campus of the College for the benefit of employees and members of the community [italics added].” This new wording was adopted near the end of 2024.
With this new language, the college could have chosen to keep the NCCC on campus. The college didn’t want to.
“That was definitely one of the biggest things Corcoran was upset about when I met with him,” Kottke said. “He said, ‘I don’t want to be in the business of childcare.’”
The NCCC, being a separate entity, looked for alternatives off campus. They couldn’t come up with the money.
“When they came back and very abruptly just said, ‘Oh yeah, well, you guys have to get out by August [2024]. I told them, ‘No, we’re not doing that.,’” DeVaughn said. “But what ended up happening is that we still ended up losing 15 families. So we [were] in a $30,000 deficit because nobody [would] come into this place because we’re not going to be here after a year, and I [could not] enroll students as we were closing in May.
“The location, it’s all financial,” DeVaughn continued. “Everywhere that I have looked, it’s been so expensive that financially, it would not make sense for us to move our business somewhere else … But then, trying to stay within this area, there’s not a lot of space for lease, or for rent or for sale.”
The lack of a complete master plan hasn’t prevented the current administration from heavily modifying the college campus. The houses to the east of the NCCC have already been torn down. According to the 2023/24 master plan, the next step is for the NCCC house to be demolished and replaced with a larger building for student housing.
New College did not respond to a request for comment on the future of the building.
Whatever the fate of the building is, the fate of the NCCC itself is certain. Just a year shy of its twentieth anniversary, the NCCC has closed shop.
The NCCC is part of what brought Kottke to New College. Now, it’s part of the reason he’s leaving. Kottke has accepted the position of Professor of Mathematics at Reed College in Portland. His Reed College tenure begins this upcoming fall.
“The sort of hostility toward everything old New College, what’s gone down at the center has been emblematic of that,” he said. “So it’s kind of rolled into everything, this attitude of hostility and mistrust of everybody that was here before. And just general poor decisions and mismanagement of the academic program, the college and things related to the college like the childcare center.”
It’s also pushing DeVaughn to leave the field of childcare altogether.
“I don’t want to, but I might have to.” she said. “It just broke my heart. And I don’t know if I want to even ever go through it again. But at the same time, this is my passion. I love kids. I love working with kids … I don’t know. It’s been a thought. It has come across my mind.
“This place is, or was, a blessing. For me, my staff and a lot of families. And we’re just going to be very, very sad that it’s not here … If we were granted the opportunity to do it again, we would definitely jump on it. Definitely, definitely, definitely. Because we love it. We love them.”
A version of this article was originally broadcast on WSLR News.
