Avon Opens 165-Seat Lettuce Patch Childcare Center

Aspen —“Every center in the Valley has a waitlist a mile long.”

Steve Coyer, a board member for Vail Valley Foundation (VVF), said it plainly. He didn’t soften the blow. He didn’t hedge with "potentially" or "could be." He stated a fact that every parent in Eagle County has felt in their wallet and their schedule.

The Lettuce Patch Early Learning Center opened its doors on Thursday, Sept. 10. The ribbon-cutting ceremony marked the end of a decades-long struggle to build adequate childcare infrastructure in Avon. Students arrive on Oct. 12.

Danielle Guilmineau stood before the crowd that evening feeling a specific type of relief. She and her husband had spent months worrying about who would watch their four-month-old daughter, Juliet, while her maternity leave ran out.

“It’s incredibly stressful to be a mom holding her newborn, wondering where she will go every day so you can return to work,” Guilmineau told the Vail Daily. “The reality is finding available high-quality care in our valley is a challenge for so many families.”

That stress is about to ease for up to 165 children. The facility will serve kids from six weeks old through age five.

The building is 13,595 square feet. It contains 12 classrooms and four outdoor playgrounds. There is a full-service kitchen inside. At full capacity, the center will employ roughly 40 staff members. Access Early Education Foundation, a Colorado nonprofit, operates the center. They handle enrollment, hiring, and daily instruction.

This wasn’t a quick fix. It was a long game.

Traer Creek LLC conveyed the land for community use in the 1990s. In 2014, the developer deeded the property to the Town of Avon specifically for education purposes. The project sat dormant until 2021, when VVF began aggressively pursuing solutions to the county’s "childcare desert." The nonprofit signed a long-term land lease with the town and broke ground in June 2025.

Coyer noted that early childhood education is expensive. Centers struggle to survive on tuition alone. That economic reality kept capacity low for years.

To bridge the gap, the community pitched in. The Town of Avon contributed $800,000 in incentives. Eagle County provided $1 million for the project. The Vail Daily reported that fundraising was a community-wide effort, though the full total of private donations wasn’t detailed in the initial announcement.

The short version: We built a building. It’s big. It has classrooms. And it’s full of hope for parents who are tired of the waitlists.

But let’s look at what isn’t being said. The center serves 165 kids. How many families in Eagle County are currently on a waitlist? The Vail Daily didn’t provide that number. Coyer said the lists are "a mile long." That’s a metaphor, not a metric. If there are 500 families waiting for one spot in Avon, does this facility solve the problem? Or does it just move the bottleneck down the line?

Access Early Education Foundation will oversee day-to-day operations. They are a nonprofit, which means they rely on grants and donations to keep tuition accessible. What happens when the grants dry up? The Vail Daily didn’t ask that question, but you should.

Town of Avon Mayor Tamra Nottingham Underwood cut the ribbon with local kids on Thursday. She smiled for the cameras. The photos show a new building, clean and bright.

It is a milestone. No one disputes that. But a single facility in Avon does not fix a county-wide shortage of affordable, high-quality care. It is one brick in a wall that still needs building.

The students start on Oct. 12. The waitlists remain.