A day after parents received notice that the Public Employees Day Care on Charleston's East End would shut down within a few weeks, Kanawha County Schools appears to have reversed its decisions temporarily.
The school system agreed on Thursday to continue operating it for a few more months.
In a letter to the state Department of Administration, Bob Calhoun, executive director of early childhood programs for Kanawha schools, wrote that the school board will continue to run the daycare program until Dec. 2.
Calhoun concluded the letter by writing that he hopes the department has found someone else to run the program by December.
"We're still pursuing other options, but this gives us more leeway in our search," said Diane Holley-Brown, Department of Administration spokeswoman.
Marty Wright, head of the day care's parent council, said he and other parents disagree with the way Calhoun has characterized the situation at the day care. Wright said the council maintains records that show the day care is not in as dire a financial state as previously reported.
Regardless, the notice parents received Wednesday prompted at least four of them to begin looking for a new day care, with one already on the waiting list. At least one teacher already has started looking for a new job, too.
When parents were notified the school system would stop operating the school, they only had three weeks to find alternative arrangements for their children. In November, the school had said it planned to stop managing the day care on June 1.
Although the state owns the building and pays its utilities, the school board pays to staff the day care, purchase the materials it needs and develop its programs. Calhoun said the school board needed to stop running the program because the board was losing money by operating it.
"Due to money, we have to get out of it," Calhoun previously told the Gazette-Mail. "One year we lost $60,000, up to last year ... it was in the tens of thousands."
That confuses Wright.
"The parent council has been receiving copies of all the invoices, expenses and tuition dollars," Wright said.
Kara Hughes, a former president of the council and a certified public accountant employed by the state's Treasury Department, keeps tracks of all those numbers and has created her own records, separate from what the school system maintains. According to her records, the day care has actually ended fiscal year 2015 and 2016 with a positive cash flow.
"We have not experienced at all any deficit spending at the end of the fiscal year," Wright said. "In short, the day care is not losing any money but has been profitable for the past two years."
The day care ended fiscal year 2015 with $4,293 of cash on hand and ended the most recent fiscal year with $1,939.32, according to the financial statements Hughes prepared.
Terry Sauvageot, director of community education for KCS, previously told the Gazette-Mail that attendance at the day care hovered around 50 children for the last four months, and that the program has 19 employees.
The parent council's records disagrees with those numbers as well. Wright said enrollment has declined at the day care - the year began with 72 children and ended with 10 less.
The parent council still plans to meet at 5 p.m. on Monday to talk about ways to save the day care from closure.
Reach Jake Jarvis at
jake.jarvis@wvgazettemail.com, 304-348-7939,
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