After 26 years of caring for kids in Gastonia, Wee Care Day School is shutting down its full-time program, and the roughly 150 children enrolled there will need somewhere else to go by December. The day care's building on Union Road belongs to Legacy Church, which wants the space back for other ventures, and families say they were given little warning and even less help finding a replacement.
Parents learned on July 29 that the school would close and relocate to a new space that cannot handle full-time day care, according to WBTV. Wee Care's last day of full-time classes will be December 18, and starting October 2 the school will shift to a scaled-back, morning-only schedule at the new site before moving in January 2027 to New Hope Baptist Church. Parent Jayme Marcum said that morning-only hours simply do not work for families where both parents hold full-time jobs.
A Church-Owned Building, Reclaimed
Legacy Church, which owns the building at 2316 Union Road, lists Wee Care Day School as one of its own ministries on its staff directory, naming Carrie Collins as the school's director. Marcum said Legacy Church should be financially supporting Wee Care's move to the new location, and she said the church's lead pastor, Darin Gibbs, told her the space was not being reclaimed for financial gain. Marcum said she doubted that explanation, telling WBTV that Legacy Church could still profit from the arrangement, either by renting the gym space to volleyball and basketball teams or by receiving money from other government programs.
WBTV requested comment and an interview from Legacy Church, but the church has not responded. The dispute leaves open a basic disagreement over motive: Legacy Church's stated reason for wanting the space back for other ventures, versus Marcum's suspicion that money is still driving the decision. Renovation costs also prevented the new Wee Care location from being renovated as extensively as originally planned, according to the outlet's report, further limiting what the relocated program can offer.
Families Face a Costly, Crowded Market
For parents, the fallout is immediate. Some preferred day care providers in the area carry yearlong waitlists, and families told WBTV that new providers are charging more than $1,000 per month for a single child, with some quoting several hundred dollars more per month than what they had been paying at Wee Care. Marcum said Wee Care has cared for and loved the children in its program since it opened, which is part of why the sudden change has hit so hard. Teachers at the school are already looking for new jobs as the closure approaches.
Those price tags track with broader child care costs in the region. Average starting rates for child care providers in Gastonia run about $18.34 an hour, or roughly $734 a week for full-time care, according to Care.com, slightly below the North Carolina statewide average. Full-time center-based care in North Carolina averages $1,031 a month for an infant and $865 a month for a 4-year-old, per TOOTRiS data, costs that routinely exceed the federal affordability threshold of 7% of median household income.
A Statewide Squeeze on Day Care Providers
Wee Care's troubles land amid a broader financial strain on North Carolina child care providers. Federal pandemic-era stabilization grants ended in June 2024, and the state's stopgap compensation funding expired in March 2025, leaving providers statewide without direct stabilization aid, according to the NC Division of Child Development and Early Education. Gaston County facilities have also historically been squeezed by lower subsidy reimbursements than centers just across the county line: five-star centers in Gaston County received $446 less per infant each month than identical facilities in Mecklenburg County, per research from NC Child.
State lawmakers have moved to address that gap. On July 2, the North Carolina General Assembly passed a budget allocating $97 million in recurring federal funds to establish a statewide reimbursement floor for child care subsidies, set to take effect October 1, according to EducationNC. Meanwhile, an August 2026 report from Partners Health Management found that local child care workers earn an average annual salary of just $28,840, a wage level that makes staff retention an ongoing struggle for facilities across Gaston County.
The stakes extend well beyond one Gastonia building. A 2026 state early learning report found that 64% of North Carolina children under 6 have all available parents in the workforce, and child care access shortages cost the state economy an estimated $5.0 billion annually in lost earnings and productivity, according to First Focus on Children. For the families who have relied on Wee Care for full-time care, that statewide crunch is now a very personal deadline: find new arrangements before the doors close for good on December 18.
