In August 2020, Fort Branch will become home to Little Miracles Learning Campus, a new non-profit school and daycare facility that includes a Registered Ministry Preschool and Pre-Kindergarten class, along with a childcare program.
With a lot of the staff coming from Holy Cross Crusader Academy, the faculty is very familiar with caring for and teaching young children. They wanted to open Little Miracles because they knew the community had a need for affordable early childhood education and childcare.
“We’ve taught preschool and pre-k for 13 years here at fort branch,” said Executive Director and Pre-K teacher Kara Hoke. “Every year we are flooded with calls from people asking if we provide childcare. With Preschool and Pre-K only being half day programs, parents have to arrange transportation not only to drop them off, but to pick them up and take them somewhere else for daycare in the afternoons.”
The educators knew that this was a problem, so they came up with an idea to make early childhood education more available to the community.
“We wanted to make sure we could remedy that situation and provide one place that took care of all the things parents needed, from childcare all the way to Preschool and Pre-K,” Hoke said. We also made sure it was affordable and the kids would receive a high quality education as well as childcare.”
The Little Miracles website launched on January 17, where you can find the staff’s contact information along posts and updates about the facility.
Even though the campus is still new, the community is not hesitating to show their support. There are over a dozen comments on the website’s first post praising the new facility and the staff, along with over 600 likes on their Facebook page.
“We have been overwhelmed with the support,” Hoke said. The positive messages from parents and the community members cheering us on in our new adventure just means the world to us. We really were nervous and had mixed feelings about leaving our current jobs because we have enjoyed being a part of Holy Cross cross for so long, but this just shows us that the community has been needing this.”
Little Miracles isn’t just for Preschool and Pre-K, though. The campus will offer a wide variety of programs for school-age children, too.
“We’ll have before and after school programs for school ages, and then summer camps for everybody as well,” Hoke said. “We’ve also got a whole lot of programs, like programs for music, art and foreign languages. We’re working to get some local community members to come in and do some skill building workshops. For example, local carpenters and things like that could come in and teach the kids some of those skills.”
With everything in the works, Little Miracles Learning Campus is officially opening this August. They plan on having an open house this summer, and Pre-Registration for the 2020-2021 school year is February 29.