Ottertail Family Center opens after three-year child care effort
A family search for child care became 35 to 40 new slots in Ottertail, where the Rupe family’s new center is built to help parents keep working.
The new Ottertail Family Center brings 35 to 40 child care slots to Maple Avenue South, south of Community Park, in a $1.4 million project meant to solve a problem that has kept parents out of jobs, cut work hours, and pushed families out of small-town Otter Tail County.
The center is built around four child care sites and is owned and managed by Three Little Otters, the nonprofit founded by Alex and Tyler Rupe. The project grew out of the couple’s own search for child care for their oldest child in 2022, when Tyler Rupe’s frustration with the shortage turned into a plan. “We should just start our own daycare,” he said. More than three years later, that idea became a concrete answer to one of the region’s most persistent workforce problems.
Otter Tail County has been treating child care as part of its economic development strategy since 2022, folding it into the Long Range Strategic Plan with a goal of making services available so residents can seek employment. County leaders have said employers regularly report child care as a barrier to hiring and keeping workers. The county’s Child Care Capacity Grant Program has awarded more than $175,000 to 38 providers, while project managers funded by a $70,000 West Central Initiative grant have logged more than 1,230 hours of technical assistance and mentorship since 2022.
The Ottertail Family Center also reflects a broader county effort to add supply. In March 2025, Otter Tail County said the project would use a $240,000 Minnesota Department of Employment and Economic Development child care economic development grant, plus $10,000 in matching funds, to cover construction and start-up equipment costs. County officials later marked a groundbreaking for the center on July 7, 2025, underscoring that the work had already moved from planning into construction.
The shortage has had real consequences in the county’s job market. When Otter Tail County received a separate $160,000 child care economic development grant in 2022, officials said it could help add nearly 200 slots countywide. PioneerCare in Fergus Falls opened PioneerKids in September 2022, and the site immediately served ten working families that had been struggling to find care. That experience, along with the Rupe family’s new center in Ottertail, shows how tightly child care, labor force participation, and the ability to stay rooted in the county are linked.
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