Friday, Aug. 2 will bring Laurie Wernli to her final day on the job as the director of the Perry Child Development Center (PCDC), a valued resource for Perry families that Wernli has helped shape for 40 years.
To help her mark the four-decade milestone, a retirement party is planned for Saturday, July 27 from 2-4 p.m. in the Clarion Room in the Security Bank Building at 1102 Willis Ave. Well wishers are invited to attend.
Wernli said much has changed — both in the classroom and in her administrative paperwork — since she started at the PCDC as a teacher of 2-year-olds in 1979. Two years later, she assumed the directorship of the center, which now educates about 100 students a year and employs a teaching staff of 12.
“Child care wasn’t as regulated then as it is now,” Wernli said. “They had some regulations, but they changed and have become more and more inclusive. And that’s just for basic licensing to become a child care center in the state of Iowa. We go much further that basic licensing.”
Wernli said computers and the internet have had a big impact on how PCDC delivers its services, but nothing has changed the center’s central aim.
“There are two main things that have always been my mission here,” she said. “One of them is for us to be a very high-quality child care center, that we provide meaningful child care services and education for preschoolers and school-agers.”
Proof of the center’s quality is its long-time accreditation by the National Association of Educators of Young Children (NAEYC). NAEYC accreditation is a qualification fewer than 10 percent of all child care centers, preschools and kindergartens in the U.S. achieve, and the PCDC has maintained it continuously since 1995. The center has also achieved five out of five stars from the Iowa Department of Human Services Quality Rating System.
Wernli said she has also worked hard to see the PCDC provide high-quality child care that is also affordable for all families. She thanked the community partners that have made it possible for the PCDC to offer scholarships to reduce tuition costs, including the United Way of Central Iowa Women United, the Dallas County Hospital, the Bock Family Foundation and St. Martin’s Episcopal Church.
The tenure for the lead teaching staff averages 26 years at the center, she said, so it is a very cohesive and competent faculty. The associate teachers, averaging nine years, have or are working toward bachelor’s degrees in early childhood education, another indication of quality in the program.
Wernli and Assistant Director Joyce Ware make up the administrative team. Longtime teacher Kim Bonjour-Eiteman will succeed to the directorship in August. After 40 years, Wernli’s experience carries over generations.
“It’s been interesting,” she said, “because I have worked with second generations now, children that came to me a long time ago are now grown and have children of their own, and we have many, many second-generation families.”
Like most educators, Wernli believes technology has been a mixed blessing when it comes to young children and their development.
“Kids when they come to us now don’t have the social skills that they did even 15 years ago,” she said. “I really firmly believe part of the reason is they are on phones and tablets and things like that all the time, and they are not getting the interaction as much as they did in the past. We really have to work with them to bring those social-emotional skills back to where they should be.”
The PCDC is located at 920 18th St. in Perry and is open Monday through Friday from 5 a.m. to 6 p.m. throughout the year. The center provides preschool programs, child care and before- and after-school programs for children 2 through 12 years of age.
The PCDC Board of Directors is composed of a representative from the Dallas County Hospital, the Perry Community School District and the city of Perry, with two at-large directors filling out the board.
