JoCo preschool closes mid-year, to parents’ dismay: ‘Scrambling for care’

A local preschool’s closure has left parents scrambling for other options. Johnson County Montessori Preschool announced Nov. 18 that it will close its doors Dec. 19 after 60 years.

For parents like Shawnee resident Lynn Meeboer, it wasn’t a lot of time to shift gears.

Her oldest daughter attended the Overland Park school, and her middle daughter has been there since last fall. She was planning to send her youngest there, too.

Meeboer knew there were issues last school year.

She said three teachers out of five classrooms had left before the end of the school year this past spring. At the same time, extracurriculars like yoga were being canceled without parents being notified.

Mike Strouse, president and CEO of GoodLife Innovations, which has owned the school since 2000, said that upheaval was due to the school losing its longtime director because of visa issues.

After Meeboer expressed concerns at that time and asked if it was shutting down, Meeboer said, “(The administrators) came in, and they were like, ‘No, we want to save this place. We’re committed to this being open.’”

She decided to stay, and it seemed that everything had been resolved.

“Things were going really, really, really well this school year. We were super happy with how everything had been going. We really loved the new teacher they had brought on from another classroom,” she said.

The sudden news of the school’s closure has her wondering why the school didn’t close at the start of the summer after the teachers left, when she thinks it would have been easier for parents to find other options for their kids.

“Not only are we scrambling for care in the middle of the year where nobody has a space, but now I have my third child to think about. What am I going to do with her?” Meeboer said.

Strouse said the closure had to happen now because he thinks they would have lost too much staff to keep it operating until the end. He said he doesn’t think there’s much of a difference closing in the summer versus now for families trying to find alternate arrangements, because they’re both semester breaks.

“It’s never easy to close the school, because it’s in continuous existence,” he said.

Meeboer isn’t the only one feeling the strain.

Prairie Village resident Mariah Ritter sent her 3-year-old son, Ben, to the school for just a few months, starting this fall. She had tried to enroll him in the summer, but the school turned her away, saying they weren’t taking enrollments until fall because they were working on curriculum and staff.

Like Meeboer, she’s been very happy with the teaching staff, but now, she has a second transition for her son in a short amount of time.

“Trying to find child care the week of Thanksgiving and then the few weeks in between now and Christmas is nothing short of a nightmare,” Ritter said.

She said it’s a challenge to find time to tour new preschools, and it’s a financial strain because you often have to put down a deposit to even get a tour or be on a waitlist.

Overland Park resident Sarah Andrews is also disheartened by the abrupt closing.

“If this was even an inkling, of what they might have thought they were going to do, they shouldn’t have sent us a letter like three days before that said they’re continuing. Definitely, giving a heads up would have been great,” she said.

Andrews said that when she had initially looked at the school, she was told there was a waiting list.

“But in the letter where they said they were closing, they said they were operating below capacity, and it wasn’t able to keep functioning, and I’m like, ‘That that doesn’t make any sense,’” she said.

Having to send her daughter to a new preschool farther away from their home is difficult.

“I’m a single mom, and I have Stage 4 metastatic breast cancer, so I am sick a lot. I have doctor’s appointments a lot,” she said.

Strouse said that after the director’s departure in the early spring, they lost several teachers. At that point, GoodLife decided that it wanted to focus on its main mission of serving adults with disabilities and stop providing services related to children.

Over the summer, he said they purposely kept enrollment low and did not seek to add new students while they made some improvements to the building with the intention of selling the preschool to someone who would keep operating it as a Montessori preschool. It was listed for sale in September but did not find a buyer.

“It was a church, and it was repurposed to be a school. For someone who builds schools from the ground up, it’s not perfectly designed for a preschool,” Strouse said.

The school has been at 7725 W. 87th St. in Overland Park for approximately 10 years. Strouse said that GoodLife currently has two local properties including this one and will seek to consolidate its operations into one of them.