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Kid Care Report: Local day care calls mandatory meeting, retrains staff

Every week Action News Jax investigates local child care centers to show you how they measure up to state guidelines. In this week’s Kid Care report there was only one center with a class 2 violation. Action News Jax  went there to see what happened and learned it’s making a big change.

Rhoda Martin Early Learning Center in Jacksonville Beach has about 34 children. The center received a class 2 violation. According to the Department of Children and Families, a class 2 violation could pose a threat to the health and safety of a child.

The violation was for a substitute teacher who needed to be rescreened for a background check. She hadn’t worked in 90 days.

Action New Jax's Letisha Bereola asked to talk to the director, Carmelita Gilmore, about the violation. She referred Bereola to human resources.

A spokesperson from Lutheran Services Florida sent this statement:

“While we expect our contractors to provide us with substitute teachers that have all the necessary paperwork and requirements to teach in the classroom, unfortunately that did not happen in this case. We should have reviewed the paperwork and realized the teacher, while background screened, had not worked in 90 days and needed to be re-screened. We are proactively retraining all our staff through a mandatory meeting on how to properly review all human resource packets to ensure everything is in order for any employee coming to us from a provider agency” -Terri Durdaller, LSF Spokeswoman

The violation was corrected on the spot, according to DCF records.

There's also an update to a day care a prevous featured on Kid Care Report. Action News Jax first reported in January, DCF was moving to revoke the license for Reid's Educational Center because of what the state called repeated violations. The facility can stay open during that process. DCF went back recently to reinspect and it had a clean inspection this time.

Action News Jax reached out to the contracted agency Rhoda Martin says it uses, ChildCare Careers, but haven’t heard back.

Search your child facility here.

CLEAN CHILD CARE REPORTS:

Little Temples Academy: 2467 Faye Road.
Tender Loving Care Learning Center: 12400 Yellow Bluff Road. 
Strive for Excellence Learning Academy: 7595 Wendell Road. 
Wonderland Learning Center: 12 E 25th St. 
Lang's Learning Center: 2726 N. Main St. 
Annie Bell's Learning Academy: 1561 Cassat Ave. 
Lover's Little One's Academy: 7900 103rd Street Suite 9 & 10.
T's Learning Center: 11761 Beach Blvd. 
Garden City Elementary: 2814 Dunn Ave. 
Beaches Academy: 1725 Penman Road
Scott's New Beginning's: 10367 Monaco Dr. 
The Discovery Tree Academy Oakleaf: 7629 Old Middleburg Road.

More:
Kid Care Report: Two local day cares have clean track records
Kid Care Report: DCF gave two class 2 and four class 3 violations to local day cares
Kid Care Report: Two local child care centers cited for violations, others receive clean reports