Two years ago, Kari Terrill took over operations director duties of a Montgomery County Head Start and Early Head Start center that had limited capacity due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Now that the center is in full capacity, Terrill is ecstatic to hear the laughter and playing from the children in classrooms again.

“It’s been a journey since I started during the pandemic,” Terrill said. “But now that we’re starting to get back into full regular services, I’m definitely enjoying it.”

The center, which opened over 20 years ago, provides early childhood services to children ages 0-5 and prenatal moms. There are 39 children enrolled in the center, which has 12 teachers, two managers (Sarah LaDoto and Casey Henry), a family advocate (Kacey Kuda) and a cook on its staff.

“A big part of what we do is obviously supporting the education of young children and the health and well-being of the entire family,” Terrill said. “Kids are very susceptible to whatever is going on in their environment, so we can provide some services to the entire family. It’s a really great thing. So we’re kind of looking at it very holistically, trying to do some social services and connecting people with resources.”

Terrill is also the operations director at the Lincoln County Early Learning Program in Troy, where she has been working for seven years. Both the Montgomery County Head Start and the Lincoln County Early Learning Program are operated by Youth In Need, which offers more than 50 direct service and support programs to children, teens and families.

In 2020, Terrill was hired as operations director at Montgomery County during a time in which many businesses were shut down due to the pandemic. The Head Start reopened in August of that year after it was closed for several months.

“The operations director who was here before took a different role within Youth In Need,” Terrill said. “We needed an operations director. I decided to split my time to make that work.”

Terrill credits the two managers – Sarah LaDoto and Casey Henry – for providing big help during the pandemic.

“They handle the day-to-day stuff,” Terrill said. “I’m here a couple of times a week to support them as needed, but the grind is primarily theirs.”

Terrill said the teachers are happy that things are getting back to normal at the center.

“They were excited to come back and have their classrooms again and just get started into their regular routine,” she said. “It’s a new routine, too, because we have to be so careful with these little guys who can’t get immunized for COVID. It’s been a ride the last couple of years. We love what we do. We call it heart work instead of hard work.”

There are several classrooms in the center such as the Dino Room – which prepares children for kindergarten – and the baby room.

“The nice thing about here is we have three teachers in a classroom,” Terrill said. “A lot of preschools have only two. We want to have three so we could get a little bit more individualization.”

The center also has a home visitation program that has 43 children. Terrill said the program has a family educator who makes 90-minute visits to homes each week.

“Obviously, with illness and appointments and things like that, they always don’t add up to every week,” Terrill said. “But they are at the home for 90 minutes to support the parent-child interaction. We do developmental screenings with the child. We do a lot of parenting tips. Along with that, they really work with the family on social service needs.”

Terrill said the center has already set some goals for 2023.

“Our big goal is we really like to be able to serve as many families as possible, especially our home visitation program because we are low enrolled there,” Terrill said. “So we’re looking for those prenatal parents of kids up to three years old. Our second goal is to really get back into our community engagement. We are planning a family engagement event in February that’s going to be kind of a messy sensory night to bring our own families that are already in the program. We’re hoping to just join the community a little bit more than we have been able to do in the past.”

For more information, call 573-564-2600.