-Another approach to addressing this issue comes from the YMCA of Southern Nevada.

Its pop-up preschool model first opened in October of 2024.

It's called Sky View Early Learning Village, and it's located on Centennial Parkway near Pecos Road in North Las Vegas.

Its modular design helps lower construction costs and expand access more quickly.

And the Y says it hopes to replicate this model across the region.

(Myisha Williams) We are trying to get all of our kids ready for kindergarten, and I just love doing it and so do my teachers.

-Myisha Williams is the director of Sky View Early Learning Village.

Children can attend the YMCA pop-up preschool at a reduced rate or for free, depending on income.

-We have free preschool, which is Nevada Ready, where, if your income-- if you qualify by income, your schooling is free for your child.

That's amazing.

That would have worked and helped me so much.

-William says when her son attended preschool, she worked there and got a 20% discount on his tuition.

Had the YMCA model been available to her son, she'd have received a 50% discount.

-That's amazing, because child care is very expensive around here.

And as a single parent, I learned the hard way that most of my check was going to paying for child care.

-Above all, quality child care is what William says she wanted for her son, and now it's what she aims to provide her students.

One indication of her success is the preschool's participation in the state's Quality Rating and Improvement System, known as QRIS.

-You have to follow certain rules that if you are not QRIS, you don't have to follow those rules.

So you have to have centers, you have to have classrooms that are full of supplies for the children.

You have to have where your teachers are going to school and getting the extra education that they need.

So that's important.

For me, as a mom, I never wanted to just let my son go anywhere.

So it's very-- I love the YMCA.

-All right.

Jordan, this pop-up model is your baby.

-It is.

-When are you going to open the next one?

-We're opening up our second one at the end of this year on Torrey Pines and Cheyenne called the Torrey Pines Early Learning Village.

So far, all of this has really been sponsored by Clark County.

The County was seeing a huge need in the community and how that was impacting a myriad of county services.

So County being the ward for welfare and foster care and homelessness, and they saw the interplay of all these different issues and child care.

And so they stepped up and found a small pot of dollars, small compared to what it really cost to build buildings, but it was enough to motivate the why to innovate.

And that's really the second piece to this conversation.

There can't be an unreasonable expectation that the State comes in with hundreds of millions of dollars and overnight fixes it.

There is a little bit of pressure on the sector to also innovate with the resources that we have.

And so when we stepped up in this space as the largest nonprofit child care provider in the United States, we really started to-- We hired an architect, and we started to look at the true cost to be able to expand and meet the critical child care shortage in this community.

And the lowest cost, even with some donated land, it came out to about 10- to $12 million for every brick and mortar child care center to serve about 225 to 250 kids.

And so that's a big ask, and that's not the amount of money that the County had available.

And so together with the County, we innovated and created this pop-up preschool model where we can take modulars and beautiful playgrounds and shade structures and interactive manipulables and community gardens and turf spaces, and we can put them in the most high-need communities for about $4 million serving about 100 kids per pop-up.

-You told me, in a conversation prior to this, that capital is your biggest issue?

-Absolutely.

We had to innovate in a lot of different ways.

One of the first issues that we had was workforce, and so we innovated in that space.

And now at the Y, workforce isn't our biggest barrier.

It's certainly not easy, but it is not our number one barrier to providing or expanding care.

We then had to innovate around curriculum and licensing and quality and credentials and safety.

Insurance costs were going up, and so we really invested in child safety.

So we really innovate in a lot of these spaces, but the one area that we just can't do as a nonprofit is capital.

The cost to add seats is astronomical.

Even $4 million, as a nonprofit, we simply don't have it.

We don't have those margins.

And the reason that we don't is, as a nonprofit provider, we provide care to anyone, regardless of your financial capacity, which means that all of our rates are so affordable that there's not margin to be able to cover the expansion of the program.

-So, yeah, a private preschool can be the cost of a college tuition.

But the YMCA, how much?

It's half off for some, free for others?

-It's about 55% of our families get access completely free through the Nevada Ready Program, which is funded by the state, and then the remaining 45% have a sliding scale.

So they could pay as little as nothing or as high as 20% below the market rate for preschool in our community.