Photo By Lauren Reho | Fort Bragg leaders joined elected officials and community partners Sept. 12 to break...... read more read more
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FORT BRAGG, N.C. – Fort Bragg leaders joined elected officials and community partners Sept. 12 to break ground on the installation’s largest child development center complex.
U.S. Representative Richard Hudson joined Col. Chad Mixon, Fort Bragg garrison commander, and officials from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Savannah District, Directorate of Public Works, and Child and Youth Services Division to officially dive into construction.
“This new facility will be the largest CDC on post, accommodating 338 children under the age of six,” Mixon said. “This will make a huge improvement to our wait list, which currently sits at approximately 600 to 700 and can be several months long. This new CDC will help a lot of our families, and it will also help reduce the strain on local civilian childcare facilities.”
Mixon said that one of the garrison’s enduring priorities is quality of life for Soldiers and their families, and access to childcare remains one of the installation’s top challenges.
“Today’s ceremony is proof of our commitment to addressing this challenge,” he said. “There have been so many who have worked hard over the last few years to make today a reality.”
Hudson said the new CDC is part of a larger effort to improve warfighter readiness and enhance quality of life. It is a milestone that will expand modernized childcare services for Soldiers and their families, which will meet the mission of enhancing resiliency to our global response forces.
“When I was first told about the need here, we had over 700 kids on a wait list needing care,” Hudson said. “My first thought was readiness, and how are we going to keep a force here when the families aren’t taken care of and don’t have access to the basics they need? My second thought was about the paratrooper who’s going to be somewhere in harm’s way doing a tough job, and in the back of their mind, they’re worried about their family back here. We don’t need that, and quite frankly, we owe them better.”
Hudson gave credit to the Army, the Corps of Engineers and Fort Bragg’s leadership for pushing the project forward, and he said the work won’t stop with this groundbreaking.
“We’re breaking ground on this facility today, but I’m already working on the next one because we still have a whole lot of kids on the wait list,” he said. “I’m not going to rest until we’re taking care of our families.”
The new child development center complex represents an ongoing garrison transformation effort to modernize facilities and expand services to meet the needs of the Army’s largest installation. Construction is expected to significantly ease the buildup for childcare slots and support our military families.
“The need has just gotten louder. The struggle has always been there, it's just that it became a louder pitch. This is just one of [many developments] that is expected to come up here on the installation,” Margaret Lilly, chief of Fort Bragg’s Child and Youth Services, said.
| Date Taken: | 09.12.2025 |
| Date Posted: | 09.17.2025 12:26 |
| Story ID: | 548409 |
| Location: | FORT LIBERTY, NORTH CAROLINA, US |
| Web Views: | 21 |
| Downloads: | 0 |
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