If you’ve ever tried to find a babysitter for a 4 a.m. shift change, you know why Boone County is building something new at its Regional Training Center: a childcare center built around the schedules of the people who answer 911 calls.
The Regional Training Center itself has been up and running since January, but construction is still underway on the childcare piece next door. Boone County Sheriff Dwayne Carey said the goal is a facility that works for deputies, dispatchers, and other public safety employees whose shifts don’t look like a typical 9-to-5 — nights, weekends, and the kind of last-minute schedule changes that make ordinary daycare waitlists useless.
“We took that challenge on,” Carey said of the project. “It will hopefully be done by the end of this year and maybe opening in January.”
That puts the opening around January 2027, give or take — Carey was careful to frame it as a hope rather than a promise, and construction timelines can slip. The center will start by serving public safety employees based at the Regional Training Center, with an eye toward opening it up to other first responder partners down the road.
It’s a recruitment-and-retention play as much as a family-support one: agencies across mid-Missouri, like most of the country, are competing hard for dispatchers and deputies, and childcare that can flex around a rotating shift schedule is the kind of benefit that’s hard to find anywhere else. For a family in Boone County where one or both parents wear a badge, it’s one less scramble every time the schedule changes.
There’s no public opening date carved in stone yet, and no word yet on enrollment details, cost to families, or exactly which agencies beyond the Sheriff’s Office will be eligible to enroll. We’ll follow up as the county firms up those details closer to opening.
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