Safety & Security
Providing a safe, secure, and comfortable learning environment is our number one priority at Bright Start Academy. We make every effort to ensure your child is safe. Our centers have procedures and high standards in place that are strictly enforced by management. In order to keep each child safe in our care, Bright Start Academy requires a manager to escort each classroom while transitioning to and from the classroom. Together, the teachers and managers account for each child before, during and after the transition.
Each building features: indoor and outdoor security cameras, burglar alarms, fire alarms, a well lit campus, telephones in every classroom, fall zones on the playgrounds, and 6-foot high exterior fencing around the campus. To ensure your child is safe, each teacher is required to receive training on emergency procedures, Safe Sleep and CPR/ First Aid.
STATE OF THE ART FACILITY
Bright Start Academy has beautiful state of the art facilities. Our buildings are safe and secure at all times. The classrooms have viewing windows for families to observe their children and classroom activities. Our playgrounds and outdoor areas are age-appropriate and spacious for children to run around, develop their gross motor skills, and let out their energy. Each center has a commercial kitchen where the center chef prepares a nutritious breakfast, lunch, and afternoon snack. Bright Start Academy offers a family resource center, which provides research materials about child development, parenting issues, and various community resources. We encourage you to check out our center photos and stop in to one of our centers for a tour!
CLASSROOM ENVIRONMENTS
Our classroom environments allow children to feel safe to create, explore and discover. Everything in the room is designed with your child in mind. We implement the latest early childhood best practices into the environment to ensure your child is developing to their fullest potential. The rooms are designed for a variety of child-led and teacher-directed activities to keep your child engaged in learning. The classrooms are set up in learning centers, which provide a purposeful way to divide a classroom. The learning centers capitalize each child’s natural need to explore and provides them with consistent and clear expectations.
CLEANLINESS
Cleanliness is vital in keeping your child safe and healthy, so our staff members take significant precautions to prevent the spread of germs in all of our centers. In our classrooms with children that are crawling, all teachers and parents who enter the rooms are asked to slip off their shoes or slip on provided shoe coverings. All spaces and surfaces that children come in contact with are disinfected on a regular basis. We understand that hand-washing and proper glove wearing is necessary to reduce the spread of germs and diseases. Children and teachers are asked to wash their hands often, such as when entering the room, before eating, after coming in contact with any bodily fluids, after diapering or assisting with the restroom, after coming in from outside, after messy projects, etc.
PROMOTING HEALTHY LIFESTYLES
Healthy Habits
Our menus include a variety of nutritious and child-friendly meals. Bright Start Academy provides a healthy breakfast, lunch, and afternoon snack each day. Our family-style mealtime routines promote social skills, such as table manners and conversation. We encourage healthy habits, such as trying new foods, associate healthy meals with positive feelings, and promote confidence and independence through self-help skills. Substitutions from the posted menu may occasionally be necessary, and if so, we will maintain the nutritional content of the meal and inform you of what was served.
MOve Smart Partnership
Some Bright Start Academy locations have partnered with the Missouri Child and Adult Care Food Program to be a certified MOve Smart location. MOve Smart is a program that provides a set of physical activity standards for our centers to follow that go above and beyond basic licensing requirements. These standards help children reach their full potential in physical growth and health.
OUR PROFESSIONAL EDUCATORS
When it comes to our teachers, our standards are as high as yours. At Bright Start Academy, your children are educated and cared for by trained and dedicated early childhood professionals. Our teachers are carefully selected to ensure that we are following National Accreditation, Missouri State, and local licensing requirements. Bright Start Academy only employs qualified caregivers who have successfully passed employment history and a criminal background check. Upon hire, our teachers undergo a new hire process that includes Staff Orientation and classroom training with skilled teachers.
Bright Start Academy believes that children benefit when early childhood professionals have specialized training and education. At Bright Start Academy, we have made a commitment to support our teachers through ongoing training, staff development, and continuing education. We not only require our teachers to follow guidelines from Missouri State licensing, but also rigorous National Accreditation standards and strict Bright Start Academy policies.
Bright Start Academy is unique in that we require Lead Teachers to have at least 12 college credit hours of Early Childhood Education or a related field. We have Nationally Accredited Lead Teachers in each age group and always encourage our teachers to pursue higher education in Early Childhood Education through a tuition reimbursement and bonus program.