Green Bay Academy child care center has closed after its license was revoked due to a drug deal on premises

A Green Bay child care center will permanently close after the recent revocation of its license.

Green Bay Academy’s license was revoked Feb. 1 for multiple violations, including an employee accused of selling fentanyl on the center’s premises and having the drugs inside the center, according to Wisconsin’s Department of Children and Families Child Care Finder website.

Tatiana Quinones, the 21-year-old employee accused of selling 50 fentanyl pills for another person in the center’s parking lot, is facing charges in Brown County Circuit Court.

Gina Paige, DCF communications director, explained that in most circumstances, a child care provider has 10 days to submit an appeal after their license is revoked. They can continue to operate during this process with some stipulations: They cannot accept state child care subsidies or enroll new children.

Shortly after the state revoked its license, married owners Gerdia Lemoine and Angel Soto decided not to file an appeal and to close the center.

“We closed abruptly, leaving parents without child care and employees without work,” Lemoine said. “It wasn’t what we wanted to do, but we weren’t profitable. With our license getting revoked, we couldn’t get funding from the state, so we had no other option than to just close.”

Lemoine said the business was struggling before the alleged drug deal — like many child care centers, it had a hard time recruiting and retaining staff, and Lemoine and Soto living out of state presented extra challenges.

Because of staff-to-child ratio requirements, the number of children a center can serve — and therefore the revenue a center can bring in — is often reduced with short staffing. In Green Bay Academy’s case, it was licensed for 123 children but was able to serve about 50, Lemoine said.

The couple listed the business for sale a month before Quinones was arrested, but with the recent license revocation, Lemoine and Soto decided to close the child care center permanently, Lemoine said. She added that the building is currently for sale.

Lemoine said Quinones passed a background check, which is required for employees at a child care center. Quinones has misdemeanors on her record, some pertaining to disorderly conduct and one for resisting or obstructing an officer.

None of these offenses would have barred Quinones from working in a child care center under DCF regulations. But Lemoine said if she had known Quinones had these offenses on her record, the center would not have hired her.

She said the state should re-evaluate its criteria for who can work in a child care center.

Lemoine said that while the center’s closure is a loss to its employees and the families who sent their children there, the situation could have been worse if a child had gotten one of the pills.

“We were considering selling the day care, so losing our license wasn’t so traumatic. But losing someone else’s life, a child’s life, that would have destroyed us,” she said.

More: UW-Oshkosh child care center closure nearly left parents in the lurch. Then, the YMCA stepped in.

Madison Lammert covers child care and early education across Wisconsin as a Report for America corps member based at The Appleton Post-Crescent. To contact her, email mlammert@gannett.com or call 920-993-7108. Please consider supporting journalism that informs our democracy with a tax-deductible gift to Report for America by visiting postcrescent.com/RFA.

This article originally appeared on Appleton Post-Crescent: Green Bay child care center closes after license revocation