Barre Town child care center partially shuttered, staff member criminally cited

A Barre Town child care center’s license to operate an infant program has been suspended after state investigators alleged that a staff member berated, cursed at, shook and roughly handled babies in the center’s care. And in a parallel investigation, law enforcement have criminally cited that same worker.

Brandy Vincent, the infant program director at the Laugh & Learn Childcare Center, has been cited by police for cruelty to a child, according to Washington County State’s Attorney Michelle Donnelly. The prosecutor said she had not yet read law enforcement’s affidavit but anticipated filing charges upon review. An arraignment date is scheduled for Sept. 7, she added.

The state began investigating the child care center and reached out to law enforcement after receiving complaints from parents, according to Janet McLaughlin, the deputy commissioner of the Child Development Division at the Department for Children and Families, which regulates the sector. After investigators reviewed recordings, performed a site visit and interviewed witnesses, the department formally suspended the center’s license to operate an infant program earlier this week. McLaughlin said suspension is usually the first step in the process to revocation.

Police have not yet released documents in the case. But a licensing report produced by DCF on June 30 describes a worker on several occasions handling infants in a violent manner and swearing angrily at them.

In one incident on June 21, the report says that the employee picked up a crying baby and said “Maybe it doesn’t hurt. Maybe that is the issue.” The baby’s cries are “muffled in short intervals,” according to the report, and then the employee is heard saying that the baby “should not have to be shaken like this. Whiplash baby after whiplash baby. This is fucking bullshit,” prompting someone to intervene.

That same day, the employee picked up the baby and tried to make them drink a bottle, according to DCF’s report. The worker told the crying infant that they “are up shit’s creek” the report states, and a few minutes later put the bottle in the baby’s mouth and then pinched the infant’s nose and said “Well, you can’t just hold it in your mouth.”

Two days prior, according to the report, that same worker tossed another baby down on a changing table so roughly that its head made a “loud thumping sound.” The worker then threw the baby back onto an infant pillow, where their head hit the floor.

A staff member who picked up the phone at the center on Thursday said they would pass along a reporter’s information to the center’s owner, Lorisa Campbell, but declined to answer questions, and Campbell did not call back. Vincent did not respond to a request for comment sent through social media.

While the state has shuttered Laugh & Learn’s infant program for now, the center remains allowed to operate its second and larger program, which is licensed separately and serves toddlers, preschoolers, and school-aged children in afterschool care.

McLaughlin, however, said that the center remains “under the highest level of scrutiny that we have.”

“We are in very close touch with them — including site visits, phone calls, email, to ensure that that program is operating in compliance,” she said.

Even before June’s investigation, licensing investigators had made regular visits to the center, including its program for older children, often citing it for troubling violations.

In September 2020, for example, a staff member grabbed a chair with metal legs and “flung it across the room,” after a child bumped them with it, according to another licensing report. A worker also used “loud and harsh tones” when talking to children — behavior that was observed “multiple times over the last six month period.” The state required the center to “develop an improvement plan for staff skill development, support and supervision related to responses to children, behavior management, and any other topics deemed appropriate,” according to the report.

A separate investigation that October found that a worker lied to a parent about whether that parent’s child was involved in an incident that had resulted in a licensing violation, and also that multiple staff members did not hold the legally required credentials for their positions.

Kierstan McConnell, an early interventionist who works at a local parent child center said she’s visited Laugh & Learn three times in the last two months. And each time, she said, she’s observed staff using vulgar language and handling children roughly, including by “snatching children up off the floor and then slamming them down into chairs.”

“I was very shocked,” she said. “I have never seen that before.”

Christie Latulippe, a local parent, said she sent her son to the center for about two weeks in 2020 before pulling him out as soon as she could find an alternative.

The last straw, she said, was when she picked up her son and found him crying, at which point she was told that he had fallen earlier that day from a 12-foot-tall slide. Latulippe was particularly perturbed that she hadn’t been called and told about the incident earlier because her son has an enlarged spleen, which can rupture more easily. The staff member she interacted with, she added, was “extremely rude.”

A year before, in 2019, a DCF investigator wrote up the center for a similar scenario. When a child had been injured, cutting their tongue, parents hadn’t been notified until the next day, the department found. That same licensing report also cited the center for failing to keep a gate closed that separated the children’s playground from the sidewalk and said that a worker stared at their phone while children played. A staff member, the report noted, also “made a disparaging remark about (a) child’s family member in front of the child.”

“My two cents is this daycare needed to be shut down years ago,” Latulippe said. “It’s not safe. They do not care.”

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