HOUGHTON — The Houghton County Board on Tuesday approved funding for one year to initiate a childcare program that has been discussed for several months.

At the regular December Board meeting on Tuesday, Iola Brubaker, head of the Copper Country Great Start Collaborative, gave a presentation on a proposal that focuses on in-home childcare programs. The proposal, she said, follows a model used in Marquette County last year that resulted in 24 childcare slots in that county in the program’s first round of its proposal.

Brubaker said that while building off the lessons learned from Marquette County’s initiative, Houghton County is saving several hundred thousands of dollars that Marquette had invested in designing the program, because Marquette is going to share its curriculum. Also, in building off that program’s lessons, Brubaker said the Copper Country Great Start Collaborative will adapt to make the program in Houghton County more as a one-on-one coach system.

Brubaker said that part of the proposal includes a candidate who has 17 years of experience in childcare, both in-home and in centers, who will work with interested people, to train and coach them in the business practices necessary to successfully running an in-home childcare. This, she said, would be both recruiting and training to build a sustainablity within the system.

The proposal focuses on in-home childcare rather than a center due to prohibitive costs.

“We looked at centers, we looked at couple of different options,” she said, “and the start-up cost of operating a large-scale center to address our needs was just too high for most of our local budgets. An in-home center is more affordable.”

While in-home programs serve fewer kids, more of them would be required, she said, but in-home childcare provision is also less cost prohibitive.

Brubaker said the initiative is for a little less than three years. She said the timeline was based on her understanding that ARPA funds needed to be expensed by a certain date, adding that she believes the program can accomplish establishing 12 in-home childcare centers within the first year it operates.

Board Chairman Tom Tikkanen said the county had previously allocated $200,000 in American Rescue Plan Act funds for childcare expansion last year.

“Our motivation behind that is to ultimately bolster the workforce,” Tikkanen said. Number.1, we want good childcare for the children. But it also theoretically allows parents who want to go out the door to work to fill this abundance of open employment slots.”

Tikkanen said another key effort behind the initiative is to make childcare affordable. Many of the existing programs are often so expensive that the costs prohibit many from going to work.

“These funds that are going to to support the Childcare Initiative are already allocated,” he said. “They are in a childcare Initiative Fund that had not been awarded to anyone. Today, we took that action.”