PORT ANGELES — After witnessing the family unit evolve during 46 years as a child care provider, Jane Childers has sold her Bo Baggins Daycare &Learning Center to spend even more time with kids — her grandchildren.
There’s nothing she’d rather do than teach children independence and to learn their own way in the world, but it’s time to move on, Childers, a Joyce resident who grew up in Port Angeles, said last Wednesday.
It was her last day of providing daycare during nearly a half-century as a child care worker or facility owner before turning over the 237 W. Eighth St. business to new Bo Baggins owner Angeline Parrish, another Port Angeles daycare provider.
Childers, whose husband, Gary, is a retired Stevens Middle School teacher and librarian, went from babysitting beginning as a middle-school student to heading a Girl Scout troop, which she still does and will continue to do, to owning six daycare facilities — to now closing that door and opening another.
In 1971, as a 19-year-old, she was one of the first licensed home daycare providers in the state and was the first in Port Angeles.
“It’s been a ride, let me tell you,” Childers said in a telephone interview.
“I’m at retirement age, and it’s time to spend time with my grandchildren.”
She sat later Wednesday at a bright red, kid-size picnic table in the colorful playroom at Bo Baggins, which is licensed to serve up to 52 children ages 5-12.
Children filed by on their way to the playground, a poster high on the wall urging them to dream.
“These are my buddies,” she said.
“It’s been the best thing in my whole life. It’s been a really good career.”
“There hasn’t been a day I haven’t wanted to go to work, and I don’t think, really, that many people can say that.”
The children’s lives she’s touched are legion, their thousands of names stuffed among records that fill five filing cabinets.
“They are crammed,” she said.
A Port Angeles School District paraeducator in the late 1970s before her Bo Baggins days, Childers has cared for the children of parents she cared for, and employs providers who attended daycare facilities she’s run.
“I see adults in town all the time that I’ve had,” she said. “It’s kind of a full circle.”
Childers attended what became Western Washington University for one year in 1970, before colleges offered early childhood education, when she discovered she had a knack for taking care of kids that might turn into a vocation.
As a former Girl Scout — she’s been involved in the program as a scout or a scout leader for 58 consecutive years — she had her own troop, and as a class project Western designed a class for fourth- to sixth-grade girls.
But she did not want to be a teacher after being a paraeducator for three years.
As a child care provider, “at least I was in control of my hours and my life and my family, and we could raise our son,” she said.
“That was a big part of it.”
Her son, Tyler, “was with me all through daycare,” Childers added.
Childers purchased her first daycare business, Olympic Daycare east of downtown Port Angeles, in 1981 from Ed and Sheri Bedford.
She purchased the Bo Baggins building in 1984 from the Ripley family.
Built in 1919, the building at the well-trafficked intersection of West Eighth and South Cherry streets was a church, an exercise studio, a Salvation Army thrift store and was reborn as a church again before becoming a daycare center, Childers said.
Back then, childcare centers were booming, she recalled.
And most children lived in two-parent families.
“I remember the first divorce we had, how dramatic that was on the staff.
“We felt bad for the child.”
Now, more than half the children are from single-parent families or non-married couples.
The other change: More grandparents are raising children.
“That’s a really huge thing now, with people on drugs and alcohol, and kids getting taken away and wanting to keep them out of foster homes.
“[Grandparents] are pretty much forced into taking them.
“They don’t have a choice.”
Children should be closer to the ages of their parents, “for energy and staying with the times and knowing what’s happening, because things are changing so fast,” she said.
“But I know that in some cases there are not many options.”
And still another change: Health issues involving children with allergies and other individual needs.
“Now there are EpiPens and inhalers,” she said.
“A lot of those issues we have now, we did not used to have.
“It seems like there are more issues because of the dynamics of the environment and families.”
Childers said she plans to write a book, too, called “Plain Jane’s Common Sense Child Care.”
“I am just making notes, collecting data,” she said Saturday.
Her advice to parents includes that they themselves become independent from their children, giving their children chores and such, but that parents be sure to be there for their children as well.
She has tried to instill that independence in her daycare kids.
Every summer she buys 50 Clallam transit passes “and away we go,” she said.
“I try to make them independent and learn what’s available in the area to keep them healthy,” Childers added.
“They know they can take the bus anywhere.
“They don’t need to be asking their parents for rides.”
New owner Parrish — a Portland, Ore.-native raised in Boring, Ore. — said Saturday she will continue with Girl Scout and boys’ club programs, and hopes to add science-oriented programs for middle-schoolers and high-schoolers, as well as add pre-school care in the mornings.
“I’m very excited about keeping the kids and going strong and having fun,” Parrish said.
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Senior Staff Writer Paul Gottlieb can be reached at 360-452-2345, ext. 55650, or at pgottlieb@peninsuladailynews.com.
