CASE STUDY:
The Peake Childhood Center
The Peake Childhood Center (Peake) is a 54-year-old non-profit organization with a mission to provide high-quality affordable child care that prepares children for school. On June 4, 2025, Peake began operating their second child care program in a $20 million state-of-the-art building owned by the City of Newport News, Virigina. The Early Childhood Center is a 34,000-square-foot center that has the capacity to serve 200 children from six-weeks to five-years-old and a dedicated space for the Virginia Peninsula Community College (VPCC) to educate and train early childhood educators. Seventy-five percent of children attending the Peake program are from families with incomes below the federal poverty level, so the cost of care to families is heavily subsidized through a sliding fee scale and the Virginia Child Care Subsidy Program. The Peake operated Early Childhood Center is an example of what is possible through collaboration, persistence, and being ready with a plan when an opportunity arises. This partnership between a nonprofit, a local government, and a community college can be replicated and is a model that demonstrates how leaders can work together to deliver real, community-driven solutions to child care challenges facing working families.
How it started
When the City of Newport News set out to write its 2020-2025 Strategic Plan in the fall of 2019, it was clear that early care and education would be included. The planning process started with a robust stakeholder engagement process, which gathered information from a wide group of community members, ranging from residents of public housing to the CEO of Virginia’s largest employer, Huntington Ingalls Industries. Regardless of the type of stakeholder, city planners heard the same story: the lack of child care capacity had become one of the city’s biggest impediments to growing its workforce and supporting the economic mobility of working families. In response, Newport News’s strategic plan prioritized increasing the availability and quality of prekindergarten programs, particularly for low-income families, so that more children would enter school ready to learn and be set up for success.
Peake was also critical in the redevelopment of the Marshall-Ridley Place neighborhood in which it is located. Three years prior to the city-wide strategic plan, the Newport News Redevelopment Authority was awarded a Choice Neighborhood Initiative (CNI) grant. The grant funded a neighborhood transformation plan that included a goal to increase the availability and strengthen the quality of early education programs in the neighborhood. The CNI grant connected community development and early care and education, and Peake ultimately became one of the ways in which the city met its key education goals for the Marshall-Ridely Place redevelopment.
The collaboration that made it work
With early care and education embedded in the Marshall-Ridley Place transformation plan and city-wide strategic plan, a partnership of four community leaders made the early childhood vision a reality. Each leader saw a different value proposition in bringing high-quality early care and education capacity to Newport News.
The driver of the effort was McKinley Price, the Mayor of Newport News from 2010 to 2022. A dentist by training, Mayor Price was married to an early childhood educator, which gave him a unique perspective on the importance of high-quality early care and education and a keen awareness of the negative implications of inadequate capacity. For Mayor Price, the value of Peake was that it would support the economic mobility of the community’s low-income working families and better prepare their children for school.
The CEO of Huntington Ingalls Industries, Mike Petters, along with his wife Nancy Briggs Petters, took the lead role in rallying the business community around the effort. As the leader of the largest industrial employer in the state, Mr. Petters used his influence to bring other business leaders to the table. He had seen first-hand how the lack of accessible, affordable child care affected the ability of his company to recruit and retain employees. For him, Peake represented a way to support and grow his workforce, while also supporting the local community.
Dr. Jennifer Parish, Executive Director of the Peake Childhood Center in Hampton, provided the early childhood expertise. The Peake Childhood Center (formerly the Downtown Hampton Child Development Center, established in 1971) had been operating in Hampton, Virginia under her leadership since 2020. When approached about launching a second center in Newport News, she had two conditions: Peake could operate the center but could not build it; and, if the Center was going to succeed, there needed to be a way to build its educator workforce. From the Peake perspective, the new center provided the opportunity to expand the organization’s mission to more children and families in a new location.
To meet the need for educators for both the new Peake center and providers in the broader community, the fourth community leader was Dr. Towuanna Porter Brannon, President of VPCC. VPCC was brought in to establish a Center of Excellence in Early Childhood Learning and Development within the new building, which would offer early childhood courses to adult students and provide professional development opportunities to the early educators working at Peake. For VPCC, Peake offered the opportunity to establish a physical location in Newport News for students.
Second, the pandemic created an awareness of the importance of early care and education that the community leaders were able to leverage to raise the additional funding needed for Peake. The Mayor and Mr. Petters hosted quarterly breakfast business roundtables including members of the business community and other community leaders to provide progress updates and lay the groundwork for Peake’s Executive Director to solicit private donations to support future programming. The ARPA funding as well as additional private dollars provided the resources necessary to fully fund the design and construction of the state-of-the-art early childhood building in which Peake and VPCC would operate.
What was achieved
The community leaders point out four immediate and anticipated outcomes of the Peake Childhood Center:
- Additional capacity to serve up to 200 more children in a high-quality, state-of-the-art setting in Newport News that promotes children’s learning and development and prepares them for school.
- Increased economic mobility for low-income working families in an area of the city in particular need of high-quality child care.
- A physical presence for VPCC in Newport News and additional capacity to train early childhood educators for the Peake Center and other providers in the surrounding area.
- A proof-of-concept model that can be used to help other communities and funders understand and experience: 1) the benefits of high-quality early care and education, 2) what colocation of higher education and early care and education looks like as part of community revitalization, and 3) a possible path to achieving a similar model in their own communities.
Barriers that remain
While robust collaboration and approximately $20 million in funding brought Peake to life, the Center faces ongoing challenges. These include:
Sustaining operational costs
Peake is expensive to operate, with an annual budget of $3.7 million. The primary driver of operational costs is Peake’s commitment to paying educators and other employees a fair (albeit still too low) wage. While expenses are high, most Peake families have incomes below the federal poverty line, and the Center has committed not to put the high cost of quality child care on these families. Peake’s sliding fee scale ensures that families pay far below the actual cost of a quality program with their payments being connected to 7 percent of their income on child care.
In addition to the tuition Peake charges families on a sliding fee scale, the center utilizes funding from the Virginia Child Care Subsidy Program (31 percent of families receive a subsidy), and Mixed Delivery Program. Yet, like programs across the state and country, this revenue falls far short of the true operational costs for a high-quality center. Each year, Peake must work to raise 37 percent of its revenue, or roughly $1 million, to cover its operational costs. Center leadership works tirelessly with partners in philanthropy and the business community to fill the gap between the cost of providing high-quality care and federal and state funding, and what families can afford to pay.
Uncertain state funding environment
Nearly 50 percent of Peake’s revenue comes from federal funds, grants, and the state child care subsidy and Mixed Delivery Programs. The budgets for these programs can change from year to year, and there is uncertainty around whether there will be enough state funding because of the recently adopted federal budget. This uncertainty is the primary reason why some of Peake’s classrooms are not fully utilized. While leadership follows the policy process closely, the instability related to their primary funding source is a barrier to Peake operating at full capacity. A significant increase in funding for early childhood education at the federal and state level would allow Peake and centers like it to operate at a higher capacity.
Lessons for other communities
Peake’s success offers a possible roadmap for other communities, and several lessons can be taken from the process. These include:
What’s next?
Peake developed a strategic plan that works to continue to improve quality and affordability, as well as strengthen Board capacity to fundraise. Both the City and Peake are seeking to leverage Peake as a model for other communities. They have welcomed visitors and provided tours of the center to groups across the state to share their story in hopes that other communities will replicate this important work.