Valentine's Day is only a few weeks away, and we are planning a fun party for the kids! If you would like your child to give Valentines to his friends, you are welcome to bring them in before Valentine's Day and we will help him work on writing them out. If you don't send in Valentines, we always have some on hand that the children can practice with. We will provide boxes or bags for children to decorate to receive their Valentines.

For our party, we'll have some fun games and activities, and there's no need for parents to send in anything else.

Thank you to caregivers who were able to attend last week's parent appreciation party in Burton. We hope you enjoyed the sweet treats and coffee! We will have another party in February.

Remember, these parties are totally optional - we just want you to know that we appreciate all you do, and we want to give caregivers an easy way to connect with each other. We will offer some parties in the morning and some in the afternoon so that hopefully everyone can make it at some point. Stay tuned for the next date!

As you know, our centers were closed today for a Professional Development Day and we are closed again next month (February 18th) for Professional Development. We typically have 5 days per year that we close for Professional Development for our staff. The topics we cover vary, but these days in January and February are dedicated to Professional Crisis Management.

We provide some information on our crisis management training in our parent handbook, but we wanted to provide a little more information now as we're completing training for our entire team.

The company that oversees our crisis management training is the Professional Crisis Management Association, or PCMA. To view their website, visit this link.

This particular type of training is meant to address a behavioral crisis, or severe problem behavior. We use this training to help prepare our staff so that when more severe problem behavior arises, they know exactly what to do.

PCM provides our staff with a number of strategies to utilize, in four primary categories:

• Crisis prevention
• Crisis de-escalation
• Crisis intervention
• Post crisis strategies

With an emphasis on crisis prevention, we often find that the more intrusive procedures aren't needed. These categories of strategies are one of the reasons we prefer this system.

In addition, this system allows us to have a trainer on staff, who is trained and re-certified annually directly by the PCMA company. This ensures that we have the most current training possible and allows for high integrity of training for our team.

Every member of our team is trained and certified with this system, and annual re-certification is required. Today's training was re-certification for 15 staff members. Our training in February will be initial certification for 5 newer staff members, who have joined us in the last year.

We will schedule this training in January and/or February every year as part of our continued commitment to safety for children and staff.

Email: info@sc-centers.com
Website: www.sc-centers.com
Location: Burton and Brighton, MI
Phone: 810-344-8082