Editor’s Note: According to an Aug. 17, 2020 Springfield News-Leader column by Steve Pokin, Grant Avenue Day Care will close Aug. 21, due to the fact that it has not covered its operating costs in some time. Director Janice Sartin has gone without a salary for three years. We wanted to take this opportunity to thank Janice, and the church, for their service to the Springfield community.
In mid- to late May when high school graduates wax nostalgic about their academic careers, sometimes they find their way back to Grant Avenue Daycare. The comment that Director Janice Sartin hears most from returning students is how much smaller the hallways are.
Janice and I laugh thinking about the difference in size the hallways must appear to a 2-year-old or a 4-year-old. Really, the hallway is almost narrow and the ceiling is not so high. Memory has a way of playing tricks on you depending on your perspective at the time a memory is made. Many, many small people have walked the halls of Grant Avenue Daycare since it opened in 1955.
The church wasn’t always located in this building. It formed in 1888 as a mission, was organized as a church in 1891 when it was located at Grant and Poplar. Eventually, the church purchased the property at Grant and Scott and moved into the building we know now in 1926. In those days, the church was bustling and growing with a much larger membership. It was well known for its large Vacation Bible School in the 1950s and ’60s.
Even then, the church had a heart for the neighborhood and saw a need to create a safe place for working mothers to leave their children. So Grant Avenue Daycare came into being as the longest continuously operating daycare in the same space in Greene County, if not the entire state of Missouri.
Kindergarten was added in the days before it was a requirement and continued into the mid-1990s until it was no longer needed. Grant Avenue Daycare has only had three directors and Janice has held the post for 47 years, so it is not a stretch to say that she has been there for multiple generations of children that attended the daycare and kindergarten when it was in operation. Truly, it would be hard to find someone who has lived in Grant Beach very long who doesn’t have a child, sibling, parent or friend that attended Grant Avenue Daycare, if they didn’t go there themselves.
Although Janice can say she has made it her life’s work to care for other people’s children, she sees it with some regret and sadness that she was the one to experience those first steps or words. She is happy to have been at the daycare to provide a place for dozens of children to learn and grow for more than four decades.