Child Care Center Offers Weekday, Weekend Service Owner Wanted To Provide Reasonable Rates And Convenient Time Slots For Parents

Need to do some shopping at NorthTown Mall for an hour without the kids?

Need a place to keep them past 6 p.m. when seemingly every other child-care center in town wants to charge an arm and a leg per minute past the hour?

Need a place to send them on the weekends?

Northtown Child Care Center just down the street from the mall at 4407 N. Division can accommodate those needs.

The center is the result of child-care frustrations experienced by the facility’s owner and founder.

“I hated paying for three hours of service for my boy when I only needed one,” said Rita Cancurler, the director of the center. “I don’t know of any child-care facility in town that takes walk-ins.”

Cancurler and her licensed full-time staff of 15 are housed in a 2,000-square-foot room behind the Washington Trust Bank building. She started the business three years ago.

“I just kept hearing about the need for more child care, so I decided to do this,” she said. “And I also realized this could be profitable if service could be provided for people when other places don’t.”

The center is open Monday through Friday from 7 a.m. to 9:30 p.m., Saturday from 9 a.m. to 7:30 p.m. and Sunday from 9:30 a.m. to 6:30 p.m. It’s also open most holidays including Christmas and New Year’s Eve.

Cancurler is licensed by the state of Washington to care for kids up to age 12. The center doesn’t have a license to care for infants. More than 100 kids are now enrolled.

Northtown Child Care charges $21 a day for toddlers, $19.50 a day for pre-schoolers and $18 a day for school-age kids ages 5 to 12.

For hourly service, toddlers are $3.25, pre-schoolers are $3.50 and school-age kids are $3.

Cancurler said she wanted to provide service for parents who work outside the traditional Monday through Friday, 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. workday.

In a survey released last year by the U.S. Department of Labor, 18 percent of the nation’s 80.5 million full-time employees worked nontraditional hours in 1991, the most recent year figures were available.

Cancurler said she also wanted to create a child-care facility that would suit parents’ personal lives.

“We get a lot of people who drop their kids off to go shopping at the mall, or to run other personal errands, especially during the weekends.”

Cancurler plans to expand in the next few months.

“We have them coming out here from the Valley on weekends because it’s just very hard to find something like this in town,” she said.

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