Flint Hills Childcare Accelerator

Location: 

Manhattan, KS

Project Completion:

Under Construction

Facts: 

17,400 sf / Project Completion scheduled for 2025

Story: 

Childcare has been a long standing need within the Greater Manhattan Community. With the collaboration of the Greater Manhattan Community Foundation, the Manhattan Area Chamber of Commerce, and community stakeholders, the Childcare Business Accelerator initiatives was formed. With further planning, the need arose for preliminary conceptual design and rough budget estimating to further frame the discussion about feasibility, cost, securing grants and private dollars, and generate community interest in supporting this project to completion. Anderson Knight was central to the original idea generation, needs assessment, community listening sessions, child care provider focus groups, outreach efforts, and grant writing.

AKA also created the preliminary design with support from BHS on a facility that would meet both commercial child care center regulations and in-home family / group providers regulations as well as public outreach and training center. Complexity of balancing the needs of a facility to have multiple programs and program types, with different levels of regulations, and provide additional community outreach opportunities created challenges in the facility design. These challenges enabled the design team to take a creative approach at problem solving to create a one of a kind solution never seen before in the state of KS or across the nation. AKA has recently been awarded the final project to finalize the design and will begin construction in Fall 2024.

Project Team:

Architect: AKA

Contractor: BHS Construction

Civil: SMH Consultants

MEP: PKMR

Structural: KDK Engineering