Description:
Small Wonders Preschool is a ministry of Highland Park Church to its members and surrounding community. It is our mission to maintain high quality programs for young children in a nurturing, loving, Christian atmosphere. We want our young children to feel a sense of accomplishment while developing socially, physically, mentally, and spiritually.
Provider First Licensed on: 8/3/01
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These above allegations are not true. We do have a new food program because the quality of the previous one simply was not good enough for our students. The situation referred to as to stopping the lunch midweek with no notice was out of my control, I was notified with no notice and so we did have to move quickly to find a new lunch provider. We are a nut free facility, which was discussed with my staff months before I announced it to my parents in preparation for the massive change in policy. When we announced the nutfree policy, we gave a grace period and sent home many parent notices. I instituted this policy to protect our students, many have allergies so severe that they could die from a contact reaction from another student or staff member. We work diligently to have high communication, we have email blasts, a texting service, parent grams on the front desk daily for the month at a glance, we have a facebook page and we send home notices as needed to parents in as far advance as possible. Highland Park Church facilities staff cleans our building as we share the space. They work very hard to keep an extremely busy building clean and sanitized. Privacy of our staff, students and parents is of utmost concern to me, and I do not break that very sacred trust. In my three years here as director, I have prayed and worked very hard to reduce turnover and hire the best staff possible. I'm exceedingly proud of my staff, I have raised salaries, worked along side Pastor Ramsey to provide our fulltime staff with health benefits, and work daily to retain our incredible staff. I welcome feedback always and am so sorry that you are so very hurt and angry. Our motto is excellence in all we do, being intentional in everything and providing the highest care and early education to prepare our students for a strong start in school. Lori Long
I had high hopes and heard good things about this facility. I toured the "school" before enrolling my children in Small Wonders & Goal Seekers. I am extremely disappointed. The facility has very high turnover/staff movement. While I agree with letting an employee go for poor job performance, at the rate and frequency this happens, I blame Lori Long's lack of management knowledge as the cause of the problem. A proper manager should know how to interview a candidate to AVOID turnover. Turnover wastes resources. A proper educator should know that all children crave CONSISTENCY. While I respect Ms. Long's willingness to release incompetent staff, I seriously question her competency in choosing an employee and ultimately the children suffer. Additionally, Ms. Long's staff grossly mishandled a problem with another student in the Goal Seekers program. When I attempted to make the staff aware of an issue, they had me talk to another child directly. One parent should NEVER be in contact with someone else's child directly. This is NOT ALLOWED to happen. After it occurred, I set up a conference with Lori Long and was told that she was aware of the incident with my child and then she told me personal information about the other student, parent's personal issues, and the child's extra curricular activities. This is NOT ALLOWED. I brought these two violations to her attention given her "experience" in education and she stammered her way through red-faced excuses. She bragged about priding herself on parent communication. I heard nothing from her in the interim between the incident with my child and the conference we had with her. Other parents utilizing school lunches were shocked to learn mid-week that their child would no longer be offered their hot lunch TWO DAYS later because she fired the caterer. Working parents grocery shopping mid-week because of the immediacy in which this occurred was a huge inconvenience! I personally walked in last week to discover notices prohibiting nut products. Staff members were unaware of the change and no notice was sent home. While garbage is disposed of daily, just this morning, I noticed the bathroom sinks have grimy build-up and the floors were dirty. The only reason my children are still there is because I do not fear for their safety--although given this mornings filth, I question their health. I'm counting down the days until summer so that I can remove my children with as smooth of transition as possible. I would not describe this as a "school" but simply a babysitting service run by someone grossly under qualified. My children will not be returning next school year.