Good morning.
Friday in Whitewater will be mostly cloudy with a high of 75. Sunrise is 7:11 and sunset is 6:08 for 10 hours 58 minutes of daytime. The moon is a waning crescent with 13.8 percent of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1931, Al Capone is convicted of income tax evasion.
At the Journal Sentinel, Cleo Krejci reports on the charitable donation of former Whitewater business owners looking to address the city’s child care gap:
Steve Moksnes remembers wondering how to best invest in his hometown of Whitewater, Wisconsin.
Then his wife of 63 years, Billie, suggested he research the impacts of early childhood education.
“You’re not just getting them ready for kindergarten. You are teaching them to work with other people, to problem solve, to control their emotions,” he said. “And that just fired my imagination.”
In September, the Moksnes donated $10 million to fund a nonprofit Whitewater Early Childhood Education and Childcare Center. They want the center to be affordable for families, and to provide competitive salaries and benefits for workers.
The goal is for the new space to open with at least 100 child care spots in 2026. The location has yet to be announced.
The project is a collaboration between the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater, the Whitewater Unified School District and the City of Whitewater.
“We spent the better part of a year having conversations with the city, the university, their child care center, other child care centers, the school district — a lot of different stakeholders,” said project co-lead Kristine Zaballos. “To talk about the need, talk about potential solutions, and to make sure that everybody who wanted to be included in the conversation was at the table.”
A 2022 study on Walworth County found the area has a steep need for child care options.
…
Thayer Coburn, vice-chair of the city’s Community Development Authority and former Whitewater school board president, is also co-leading the project. He described child care as a driver of development in the city — and a “limiting factor for growth” when there’s not enough of it.
City Manager John Weidl said a lack of child care options has prevented businesses from opening, or expanding, in the city. Most people looking to buy a home, or work in Whitewater have children, he said.
See Cleo Krejci, Former Whitewater business owners look to address child care gap with $10 million donation, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, October 16, 2025.
Our city has among its many talented residents those who can make this donation for early child care an enduring success. (For myself, I am in the position of a man who can tell time but cannot build a watch. I can see that a timepiece is needed, but I wouldn’t be able to craft it.)
It’s enough to know, as I’ve noted elsewhere, that this is a charitable contribution unmatched in Whitewater’s history — not merely in magnitude, but also in direction and timing. There could be no better object of charity than the care of Whitewater’s youngest residents, and no better time to meet their needs than now.
James Webb Space Telescope captures Milky Way’s ‘largest star-forming cloud’: