Dandelion Discovery Center, a new child care facility in Northport, is aiming to open its doors in January 2025. Leading the center is Betsy Garthe-Shiner, a Northport native and familiar face to many in the community.
Garthe-Shiner said she’s excited to give back to the community that she grew up in after being away for so long and can’t wait to get things opened and running after months of working through the application process. Licensing of the center is expected to finish up before the anticipated January 6 opening date.
“I am absolutely over the moon,” Garthe-Shiner said. “I think this is a really cool opportunity for me having grown up in Northport to give back to my community and to work with families that I’ve known for decades. Also just having lived around the country and to bring all of this experience back and use it right here in my actual hometown is pretty incredible… I’m hoping to make this a really engaging, exciting place to be a child.”
At Michigan State University, Garthe-Shiner studied child development and education, and has been teaching in a variety of different settings for the last 15 years. She said overtime, she became really drawn to educational styles of teaching like Waldorf, Reggio, and Montessori, and observed the different ways of delivering curriculum at schools in Hawaii, Alaska, and in Lansing. In July of 2023, Garthe-Shiner moved back to Michigan, where she was able to find work at the Leelanau Children’s Center before coming across the opportunity to open the center in Northport.
“Then low and behold, an opportunity opened up in Northport, which is the community I was raised with and was closest with in my heart,” she said. “So the opportunity to reopen this space came about and I felt like it was really important, so I’m giving my best shot at a mixed age center.”
The center will be open yearround, Monday through Friday from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. Garthe-Shiner said she’ll be starting out by accepting up to six children ages five months to five years old, and plans to expand her staff and number of enrolled children by June based on the number of interested families she hears from.
Dandelion Discovery Center will be located where Little Acorns Child Care, the first microcenter in Michigan, once stood at 164 S. High Street. Little Acorns was led by Northport resident Amalie Kristiansen for about a year, with Garthe-Shiner noting that she’s grateful for all the work Kristiansen put into getting the building up and running.
In recognition of the financial stresses on families, Garthe-Shiner said a tuition subsidy program is being created to assist families who are in most need of support. More information on financial assistance will be available in 2025 as they get closer to opening day.
The Leelanau Early Childhood Development Commission (LECDC), which created the Infant & Toddler Childcare Start-Up program, was a tremendous support to Garthe-Shiner through the process as well. The organizations are funded by the Early Childhood Investment Corporation Innovation grant, which helped connect Garthe-Shiner with funding for the project. Through the start up program, she’s also been able to connect with area groups for further support that have childcare in their focus, like the infant toddler learning community.
“It really takes a village to raise children. It’s a really beautiful partnership, so they are supporting a lot of the expenses related to the program, and making it so it can be more accessible for all families,” she said. “We are very fortunate in Northport to have a huge number of really incredible community members that can help support this project as it grows.”
While Garthe-Shiner continues to focus on getting the center open, she said she can also picture how programming could shift and change in the years ahead.
“I would really love to have an after school program for older kids and I’d love to see more ways to have programming for families and positive things for people to do, even after school. It doesn’t just have to be for school time,” she said.
For more information about the services offered at the center and 2024-2025 rates, email Shiner at betsy@dandeliondiscoverycenter. org.
