For most of her life, Stephanie Knoepflein has been very passionate about daycare.

“Daycare has been my background,” the Montgomery City resident said. “I started at 16 at a daycare after school and I have worked for a daycare forever.”

Now, Knoepflein is the director of the new Montgomery County R-II Daycare Center, which is located at the back of the Montgomery City Elementary School building. The center had its first day of full enrollment on Aug. 20, which was also the first day for all of the schools in the district.

“We’re really excited,” Knoepflein said. “We have a really good team of ladies to help. We’re excited to offer this to the staff of the school district.”

Knoepflein heads a staff that also includes assistant teachers Brenda Knepf and Stephanie Parrish. Both of them are working at the R-II district for the first time.

“I was kind of approached last March about the possibility of this and what kind of what it would go into all of the daycare for the school district,” Knoepflein said. “I got the position of the director and I kind of hit the floor running in a way with getting this remodeled over the summer and then a quick turnaround for the three of us to get it look like a daycare and be ready for kids.”

The daycare center has four rooms and has about eight students. R-II Superintendent Dr. Tracy Bottoms said the back of MCE, which was built in 1972, hasn’t been utilized until school officials decided to turn it into a daycare center.

“In my five years (with the district), this was storage,” Dr. Bottoms said. “When we put this together, we put up new flooring and new paint and construct new things.”

Dr. Bottoms said the district decided to add a daycare center so it could get an opportunity to add more teachers to the staff.

“It’s been well-received,” he said. “When we lost one of our math teachers, we hired a math teacher because we had daycare.”

Knoepflein, a Holts Summit native, graduated from the University of Central Missouri in 2008 with a degree in child and family development. She did child care at her home and was a stay-at-home mother. She worked for the Parents As Teachers group for over a year before she took over the daycare director job.

“Owning a daycare has always been my dream that I wanted to do somewhere down the road,” Knoepflein said. “This is how it worked out.”