ROCHELLE – The City of Rochelle put out a survey last week looking to gather data on the need for daycare services in the community. 

City officials have spent months endeavoring to help get a daycare facility back in town after Kishwaukee Family YMCA Child Care Center at 1010 N. 15th St. closed last year.

The survey is seeking data on the overall desire for a daycare center and the appropriate hours to serve the city. The city’s Facebook post accompanying the survey said it will help it determine the feasibility of a daycare in Rochelle. It said the next steps would include “establishing a 501c3 nonprofit organization to fundraise locally, applying for grant dollars, securing a location and ultimately re-establishing a childcare center in Rochelle.”

The survey was put together by Mayor John Bearrows and Director of Marketing, Public Relations & Tourism Jenny Thompson. 

“We’re just trying to find out, is there really a need for it?” City Manager Jeff Fiegenschuh said. “And from what Jenny has told me, overwhelmingly there's a need for it based on the survey results. In one day we had over 120 people fill it out.”

Fiegenschuh reiterated that the city does not want to run a daycare in town, but is still working to help bring one to Rochelle because of its importance to the community. Him, Bearrows and Thompson plan to tour the closed down YMCA facility this week with a few others in their working group. 

“If it meets the needs, then we need to start a capital campaign to raise money to try to purchase that building or find a facility to go in,” Fiegenschuh said. “We're working to set up a not for profit that would oversee it all.”

Fiegenschuh said he thinks the community will start to see more movement soon on a daycare, but stressed that they’re not easy to start and are not profit centers. In talking to representatives from towns with a community daycare, the city doesn’t typically subsidize it, he said. 

Larger employers pay a lot of the cost in some communities, Fiegenschuh said. One community saw one of its employers build the facility and charge a dollar a year for the lease and maintain the grounds and pay for taxes and utilities. 

The city manager said he hopes the city sees businesses step in and help out with a daycare. At a business summit a couple months ago, one of the issues businesses said they were facing is a lack of a daycare. And once that issue is eventually solved, Fiegenschuh doesn’t want it to become an issue again. 

“We don't want to just start something and have it falter within a year,” Fiegenschuh said. “We want to make sure it's done the right way. Our job is to help facilitate, work with partners and bring people together to try to find a way to get this thing going and be a catalyst for getting it going and let a not for profit take it on and run it."

Fiegenschuh said he’s unsure how fundraising would work for the daycare project, but guessed that an eventual nonprofit with a board of directors would take it on with community help. He said his hope is that the city would make a one-time contribution to aid in the efforts. 

City officials have seen a lot of meetings and roadblocks in the efforts to help bring a daycare back to town, Fiegenschuh said. 

"It's an issue and we need to continue to keep it at the forefront,” Fiegenschuh said. “You just keep pushing forward and we've put so much time into it and a lot of volunteers have met and come to town and talked about it with us. We need to continue to push this."