Women of the Year: Kerra Bower deploys the village to build several culturally responsive child care centers around Spokane

Though she now owns and operates three child care centers in Spokane, Kerra Bower was “miserable” when she started. Around 18 years ago, she’d just left a promising career as a travel ambassador for People to People, intending only to temporarily stay home with her own young son to save on child care costs. Eventually, she decided to run a child care business and was responsible for a gaggle of kids at her home in West Central.

“I was sitting in my living room in my yoga pants watching other people’s children … and I was miserable. I was really miserable,” she said.

Her heart wasn’t in it, and she felt she was doing the bare minimum to tend to her kids.

One day at church, she was having a “woe is me” moment in the pews, feeling unsatisfied with her career path. Not knowing of her personal conflict, her pastor approached her with words that fueled a new sense of purpose.

“He was like, ‘Long after you forget the children you’ve had in your home, your impact will last with them,’ ” Bower recalled. “I was like, ‘Oh my God, I just ruined all these kids.’ ”

Her pastor’s words became the cornerstone motivation that turned what was supposed to be a temporary detour to her current passion: methodically filling child care gaps in Spokane by operating two Little Scholars Early Learning Centers and Raze Early Learning and Development Center. Enrolled across all three facilities are some 120 kids from infancy to school age.

Bower has transformed an old Department of Transportation building in North Spokane into her latest endeavor, Raze, which opened last month. Inside are a handful of fresh classrooms from STEM and arts, and two lined with pint-sized beds, glowing with soft lighting.

These rooms are set aside for the center’s after-hours program, open for families until 11:30 p.m. Kids nuzzled in bed there, she hopes, will feel a sense of “safety, security and individualism,” she said.

“We want kids to get in these beds, and one, understand that it’s theirs,” Bower said of the beds, each covered with a large leaf umbrella. “They have a space for all of their personal photos and things like that, but it provides this feeling of like, ‘It’s my own.’ Especially, there’s a lot of kids that don’t have their own beds.”

Nontraditional hours was one of the first child care gaps Bower noticed when she opened her in-home service, which offered care 24 hours a day. One family drove from Deer Park for the evening child care.

“We don’t have enough nontraditional hours here; that’s huge,” said Luc Jasmin III, owner of Parkview Learning Center and Eastern Washington outreach representative for Gov. Bob Ferguson.

Jasmin has worked with Bower over the years in child care legislation advocacy at the state level through their group Washington State Childcare Centers Association. He praised Bower’s enduring efforts to integrate more of the Black experience into her centers and her solutions-focused mindset.

“There’s the tangible stuff, like the nontraditional-hours early learning that she’s doing, but to bring in that cultural aspect that you really need to be very mindful and strategic on how to do it, kudos to her,” Jasmin said.

Prison may not be parents’ first consideration when it comes to finding child care, but it’s heavy on Bower’s mind. Dismantling the “preschool to prison pipeline” is one of Bower’s driving forces in her work, building her centers around culturally responsive child care that emphasizes Black culture and history for her young pupils of all races.

There’s a wealth of research pointing to the issue that Black students are disproportionately expelled and suspended from school. Black kids are more than twice as likely to be arrested or referred to law enforcement as their white peers, according to the American Bar Association.

Addressing this issue starts early for Bower, who said she sees early signs of kids lacking emotional regulation skills that could lead to discipline at school.

“They use high school graduation rates to predict how many prison cells they’re going to need in the future,” Bower said. “You can predict the high school graduation rate by the reading level of a third- or fourth-grade male, and you can predict the reading level of a third- or fourth-grade male by the number of words an 18-month-old recognizes.”

It’s a personal matter to her as a Black mother, but keeping kids in school should be a priority for all in order to maintain the good health of a community, she said.

“If we don’t start here, we’ve lost such an amazing group and generation of kiddos,” Bower said.

Bower builds her centers around this concept, also ensuring to uplift the Black American experience. Lining the walls at Raze are portraits of Black figures past and present, including local civil rights leader and lawyer Carl Maxey and national icons such as the Tuskegee Airmen, the first Black military aviators who fought in World War II.

It’s not just important for her Black students to see themselves reflected in her curriculum, but for all her pupils.

“Black history is American history, and this is what it looks like,” Bower said. “We know that when students who are not Black are involved in education like this, it helps them become more global-minded. It helps them have more empathy.”

Bower not only looks after her kids, but the adults working in her centers. She gives her teachers their own nap room for long shifts, and has for three years employed support for teachers at her centers.

“You have to take care of the teacher in order for that teacher to properly take care of the students,” Bower said.

But she didn’t stop at her own centers. Bower spread around some grant funds to provide clinical staff at five total early learning centers, including Jasmin’s Parkview.

“For me, it’s just going back to that village concept, and that’s really big in Black community,” Bower said. “They say if there’s a Black woman in the building, your mom is there. And that is the absolute truth.”

Her centers embody that “it takes a village” philosophy. She regularly invites people from outside organizations into her center if a kid needs extra help. She’s arranging for doulas from Shades of Motherhood Network to help a finicky baby take a bottle at Raze, and inviting Black men from a local mentoring group to model nurturing behavior to her kids.

“A lot of people struggle because they feel like they have to do this alone. And really Raze is saying you don’t have to do this alone,” said Stephaine Courtney, executive director at Shades of Motherhood Network and a close friend to Bower, the Godmother to her son.

It’s not just kids in Spokane who reap the rewards of Bower’s labor. She’s a vocal advocate for child care on a state level, too. Jasmin credits her voice for helping to expand the child care reimbursement rate from the state from 35% to 80% of a center’s costs under a particular grant program. She also rallied the Legislature to expand the income eligibility for child care subsidies for families.

“Just being able to see her in those early days, talk to legislators, legislators who were never early learning advocates, and see them literally do a 180 to figure out how they can support, that’s when I really realized – she’s a star,” Jasmin said.

The effort is well worth it, Bower said. She’s working to build a stronger village in Spokane and beyond in which rearing children should be everyone’s priority.

In her years working in child care, a field she never intended to enter, she’s learned two life lessons. First, trusting God’s plan for her, that everything will work out as divinely intended. Second, “Stop doing it alone,” she said.

“The amount of times that God and community showed up for me and showed up for this project, that’s the lesson,” she said. “That’s the lesson, don’t do it by yourself. Because I can’t.”