Jerk Day Care Owner Shuts Down Without Telling Anyone, Screws A Bunch Of People

Pretty much a working parent’s worst nightmare came true in everyone’s favorite epicenter or people doing strange or awful stuff: Florida.

According to clickorlando, the owner of Children’s Playskool in DeLand, Florida, sketchily called a moving company to empty the facility on Saturday and then shut the doors permanently that night without telling any of the parents or staff.

Celianne Santos Romero, the owner of the joint, told the moving staff that everything was on the up and up, but the owner of the company figured out pretty quickly that she was a lying liar full of lies.

“She had us throwing away blankets and clothes, taking their names off of their bins, saying the parents know about it, they just left this stuff. (Romero) told me all about the fact that she is going to Puerto Rico and, you know, she told all the teachers that she was closing. Well, if you told the teachers you were closing, why do you have teachers knocking on your door?”

Wow.

Someone must have snitched on Romero, because at least one teacher, Tina Goldin, heard some sketchiness was going down and showed up to call the cops, saying, “This is very upsetting. This leaves about 10 of us without a paycheck.”

So a lot of people are losing money in this raw deal; all of the parents who are paid up for the month and the teachers who rely on the daycare as a source of income. Arguably the people getting screwed the most are the kids who attended Playskool, and just had a whole lot of their possessions trashed.

Apparently some of the teachers already knew something was up when hours were being cut left and right and the clock-in system stopped working sometime after the center lost its state assistance funding for early education.

This was pretty much my greatest fear as a poor working mom. I wasn’t on any state assistance, but a sizable portion of my meager paycheck went to keeping my child in day care so that I could go to work. I would have literal nightmares about waking up only to find that her daycare had suddenly disappeared, leaving me screwed.

As a mom and a former daycare worker, I feel nothing but contempt for this woman. She fleeced a bunch of people and bounced, leaving so many kids, parents, and employees in the lurch without so much as a “hey, I’m about to wreck your life in a pretty big way.”

If the center was part of a state-assisted program, that means that a lot of the parents were like me, circa 2007, with the kinds of jobs that offered amazing benefits like immediate termination if you didn’t show up for a single shift, so I think that’s why I feel so ragey about this.

Her staff plans to be at the center today to tell parents what Romero lacked the ‘nads to; that they have to go elsewhere with their kids. The movers are setting up a fundraiser to help out, because someone in this situation has to not be a dick.

As for Romero, this one’s for you, lady: