Latest news with #MarisMendes
Yahoo
10-03-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Preschool company abruptly closes three of its central Ohio locations
COLUMBUS, Ohio (WCMH) — With just weeks' notice, multiple central Ohio preschools under the same company are closing by the end of the month, leaving employees and families with little time to adjust. Guidepost Montessori is closing three of its four central Ohio locations by March 31. Nationwide, the company has closed almost 50 of its more than 150 schools with minimal notice. An administrator said the situation has been 'miserable.' 'We have parents begging us to do something,' she said. Alumni societies pull donations after Ohio State cuts diversity officies The administrator — who asked to be anonymous as she is staying with the school until its closure — said staff learned the schools would close on Feb. 25. Guidepost locations at Dublin, Muirfield Village and Powell will close, with the Worthington location remaining open. Although Guidepost and its parent company, Higher Ground Education, had significant financial backing from groups like LearnCapital and the Walton Foundation, its rapid expansion appeared to overtake the costs needed to maintain its schools. Higher Ground's CEO and founder also resigned in the last two weeks, adding to the confusion. Interim co-CEO Maris Mendes said via internal newsletter that the company's overextension has led them to close nearly a third of the company's schools. All closing Columbus locations provided care for kids between 12 weeks and 6 years old. Guidepost Montessori's website does not indicate these locations are closing and still invites families to reach out. The Muirfield Village webpage says the school is accepting applications for infant through kindergarten programs. Community plan aims to revitalize Eastland Mall property Guidepost schools across the country are affected. News outlets have reported closures in at least 10 states this year. In October, Guidepost's missed rent payments at a facility in Virginia led to the building's landlord locking the doors without warning. Dozens of workers and families were left without access, and news outlets reported children's and teacher's belongings were locked inside. In a letter to Denver television station KMGH, Guidepost Montessori said the specialized education, training and educational materials are expensive. The representative said many schools were running losses of $50,000 per month and that the company's creditors were no longer willing to bend. Financial reports for the company are difficult to track down, as they only have four SEC filings and are not a nonprofit, so their tax documents are not readily available. The most recent public data comes from lease agreements, where Guidepost was reported to be nearly doubling its revenue each year through 2022. Father behind Lauren's Law in Ohio sues disability care facility after eviction The administrator said she wished the company had given them at least a few months' notice. She said Montessori schooling, which emphasizes independence in learning, is a niche educational experience, which makes it harder to bounce back from the closures. 'Now there's faculty scrambling to find employment, because Montessori is so specific,' she said. She said families are also struggling to find new childcare options, as the Worthington location had minimal openings. Among the three locations, there are 91 students left without childcare, according to the schools' most recent state inspections. Using that same data, even if the Worthington location enrolled kids to its maximum legal capacity, at least 16 would still need a new school. Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
Yahoo
05-03-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Opinion: A Rapid Succession of Child Care Closures Calls for Close Scrutiny
The closure of a child care program can be devastating to children, families and the early educators who staff them. When a number of programs owned and operated by the same company — often referred to as a child care chain — start closing in rapid succession, it becomes cause for alarm and deserves attention. That's what's happening with Guidepost Montessori, as multiple sites around the country are closing. This episode, which is one of the first illustrations in the U.S. of what can happen when a for-profit child care chain goes sideways, calls for close scrutiny. Guidepost Montessori is a network of more than 130 Montessori-inspired child care programs and schools serving children ages birth to 18, with most programs focusing on children under 6 years old, according to its website. Most sites are located in the U.S., with some abroad. The network is owned and operated by Higher Ground Education, an education management company that is backed by tens of millions of dollars in venture capital funding. Higher Ground Education pursues what one of its funders refers to as a 'hyper-scaling' approach, and founder and CEO Ray Girn (who recently resigned) once drew an explicit analogy to Airbnb, telling EdSurge in 2020, 'I think that there is an opportunity to achieve [with Guidepost] what ride-sharing apps or Airbnb have achieved: show the world another way of doing education at a sufficient scale.' Get stories like this delivered straight to your inbox. Sign up for The 74 Newsletter Get stories like this delivered straight to your inbox. Sign up for The 74 Newsletter Yet just since the beginning of 2025, at least 16 closures have been reported by local news outlets: Guidepost has announced closures of all five active sites in Colorado (and paused a sixth site that was slated to open) as well as three sites in Ohio, two in Iowa, two in Minnesota, and sites in Missouri, Oklahoma, Virginia, and Wisconsin. These closures follow others that occurred abruptly last year in Virginia and in Oregon (the latter allegedly as a response to staff unionization attempts). Importantly, these are just the known closures that have been publicly reported in the news. In a Feb. 28 post on the Higher Ground Education Substack, where the company shares weekly memos, new co-CEO Maris Mendes acknowledged that the company is 'in the midst of closing nearly 1/3 of the school communities that have so lovingly been built over the past 9 years.' According to Mendes, the driving force behind the closures is the same hyper-scaling strategy Higher Ground's investors saw as a selling point; she writes that, 'In our eagerness to meet the vast vision of our mission, we overextended ourselves, growing our school network beyond what we could effectively support, both financially and operationally.' Specifically, the company is struggling to pay rent to landlords. Last year, two Guidepost Montessori sites in Northern Virginia closed after reportedly missing multiple rent payments, spurring the landlords to change the locks. In December 2024, Guidepost lost a civil judgment in Missouri for nearly $240,000 in non-payment of rent and 'unlawful detainer' of the premises by Guidepost. Similarly, in a letter to Denver ABC 7 about the Colorado closures, Guidepost asserted that 'Our organization struggled to raise the capital necessary to support our schools, the majority of which were still recovering [from the pandemic], and suffering major losses. At many schools, we were running losses of $50,000+ per month that our creditors were no longer willing to subsidize, and we've had to figure out how to manage. In some cases, our landlords have been able to help us navigate these difficulties. They have generously provided rent relief, or renegotiated lease terms, in order to help an individual school to overcome its challenges and reach a point of financial sustainability. In other cases, that hasn't been possible.' The pandemic point is an interesting one. The pandemic certainly threw many child care programs for a loop, but it's worth observing that Guidepost raised $70 million in equity through two funding rounds in January and April of 2021 and continued to open new sites at a rapid clip, suggesting an aggressive strategy despite the pandemic rather than one hobbled by it. The trouble Guidepost finds itself in is reminiscent of other child care chain collapses or near-collapses outside of the U.S. As I wrote last year, large chains like Australia's ABC Learning and the Netherlands' Estro Group previously saw rapid and widespread closures due to financial mismanagement or overly aggressive growth. While much more remains to be investigated, Guidepost may be on the path toward becoming one of America's most significant child care collapses. It's unclear what the outcome will be for the network, but it's certainly worth asking questions about how and why this happened, whether there are any problematic trends that reach beyond Guidepost and pose risks for other chains, and what can be done to stop a company relied on by so many families and educators from getting in this type of mess in the first place.
