Daycare facility shut down remains a mystery

Daycare facility shut down remains a mystery By Vinay Bhagat vinay@theheraldnewspapers.com On November 1, 2006, twenty-six staff workers employed at the Just For Kids day care center near downtown Sevierville will lose their jobs. Seventy-two local households will be told to find another daycare facility for their children, and many of the parties involved still don’t quite understand why the daycare facility is shutting down in the first place. As reported earlier, the announcement that Just For Kids would cease operations on November 1 was made on Monday. Three days after the announcement, staff employees and concerned parents continue to speculate on a wide variety of theories regarding the facility’s shutdown. Some contend that Just for Kids, which is managed by its parent organization, the Smoky Mountain Children’s Home, simply has other priorities that have not been made public. Some even speculate that the center took in disadvantaged kids who were unable to pay for daycare, therefore failing to generate enough revenue to meet its financial responsibilities. At the center of this controversy is Larry Pemberton, Superintendent for the Just for Kids day care center. Pemberton, in a letter distributed to parents on Monday, attributed the shut down to the Smoky Mountain Children’s Home’s greater concern about taking care of “Level II children,” or children with psychological problems. While this was the reason offered for the closing, the nature in which it was announced has led employees and concerned parents to speculate as to real reasons why the center is shutting down. The peculiarity associated with the shutdown began on Monday, when Pemberton asked Earlene Nations, Director of Just For Kids, to distribute a brief, tersely written letter to parents informing them of the shutdown. For Nations, the incident was a simple case of putting two and two together: if parents were no longer able to bring their children to the daycare facility, then obviously, she concluded, the staff employed at Just For Kids, (all twenty-six employees) would be losing their jobs. To say the least, she remarked, “It was a strange way to find out that we were losing our jobs.” But there remains the mystery behind Pemberton’s tenure. Having only been the superintendent of the children’s home since September, announcement of the daycare facility’s shutdown was made remarkably soon after Pemberton’s appointment. According to Nations, Pemberton has off-handedly remarked that the day care center was in fact having financial difficulties. Nations recalls that in two separate statements Pemberton said the facility was losing “fifteen thousand dollars a month,” and that Pemberton later revised the statement to “fifteen thousand dollars per year.” While the disparate statements might simply be an error in speech or perhaps comprehension, the fact that financial reasons were not even cited in letters to employees and parents is yet another cause for concern and speculation. Given that the Smoky Mountain Children’s Home will continue to run as a separate establishment, and given that Pemberton will continue to hold the position of Superintendent, the twenty-six workers who now work on borrowed time and the seventy-two households that now scramble for an alternate daycare provider all simply want something that no one has yet been able to provide: an extensive explanation concerning what exactly went wrong. Several attempts to contact Pemberton were made Pemberton has not been available for comment. Many say this is a fine daycare and must not be allowed to close.