KANSAS CITY, Mo. — The Kiddie Depot has been a prominent child care facility in Kansas City since 2012 and the 24/7 facility at 35th and Woodland continues to expand.
The center provides day care, pre-K and before- and after-school services for children between 6 and 12 years old.
The Depot will be expanding to 22nd and Prospect, thanks in part to the 1/8-cent sales tax that was passed in 2017 and an ordinance passed by City Hall earlier in 2019 to help fund the $3.1 million development, which will be called KD Academy.
Co-founders Penny and Myron McCant said they serve around 100 to 115 families every 24 hours, and have about 400 children on their waiting list.
With the expansion, the McCants said more families will be welcomed into the child care facility, and they will be able to provide more educational services to the children they serve.
"The things that we offer and what we're teaching our children will advance also," Penny McCant said. "So with this pre-K blight that they say that we have, we want to fulfill that by also offering pre-K services to even more children to help get our babies ready to enter the school system."
They also said there will be more jobs along the Prospect corridor.
"Currently, we have about 20-21 employees and going forward in our development, we think we will have up to 60 employees," Myron McCant said.
Myron McCant said KD Academy will have approximately 10,000 square feet for child care and early learning services, and another 4,500 to 5,000 square feet for pediatric services for the neighborhood.
"There's a lot of services the urban core doesn't offer right now, so we want to have a transformative development that would not only appease the children that we provide services to, but the children around the neighborhood," Myron McCant said. "What we found out is a lot of our children needed things as simple as shot records, and that family — a lot of our families — don't have transportation."
The McCants said none of this would have been possible without the hard work of their employees.
KD Academy will break ground mid-June, taking roughly eight months to complete. Doors are planned to open in 2020.
The McCants are also looking at including a STEM school in a second phase of the development.
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