Discovery Kidzone was recognized as Jefferson County’s Innovative Business of the Year by the Jefferson Local Development Corporation (JLDC).
“It was exciting,” Rachel Supalla, director and owner of Discovery Kidzone, said of the award, “I know the pandemic has been hard, but we’ve been having a really great year, even though we are in a terrible year … at the beginning we dropped down to 30% [attendance] which was very scary and then we built our new school and now we have a waitlist again,” she said.
Discovery Kidzone was started in 2009 by Supalla as a small in-home preschool but has since grown to three locations (two in Montana City and one in Clancy) serving more than 250 children, from infants to school-age, with nearly 50 employees.
Suppalla has a bachelor’s degree in early childhood, P-3 education as well as a master’s degree in early childhood administration, and is Montessori certified and Reggio Emilia trained.
Alison Richardson, the executive director of JLDC, explained that the decision to name Discovery Kidzone as Innovative Business of the Year was based on expansion and modernization.
“For the innovative side, a lot of it was related to the exponential growth that they have gone through over the past few years — expanded their campus, and even just the Montessori approach,” she said.
Supalla describes the Montessori and Reggio philosophies of education as vastly different, but working well in unison.
“Montessori is a very hands-on and independent learning approach … So the kiddos learn at their own individual levels and use the environment as another teacher. The teacher puts items out on the shelves that are at [student’s] individual level and the items are self-correcting so that they know when to fix their own mistakes and learn from that.”
Reggio Emelia is a more collaborative learning process, according to Supalla, making it distinctly different from the individual-based Montessori methods.
‘It’s more of an artistic and creative approach to learning and more like a community-type of learning, so the combination of the two is, in my opinion, and experience, the best of both worlds,” said Supalla.
Supalla said Discovery Kidzone will no longer be seeking higher STARS ratings. STARS is a Montana state program described by Montana DPHHS as “a voluntary quality rating and improvement system that aligns quality indicators with support and incentives for early childhood programs and early childhood professionals.”
Instead, Discovery Kidzone is seeking to be an accredited child care program, which means they have to meet higher standards than simply licensed facilities.
“We decided the STARS program isn’t completely aligned with our philosophy … I developed my own curriculum where I’m an adult trainer so I do all my own teacher training. It’s all specialized so it’s just very different from the cookie-cutter STARS approach.”
JLDC also recognized two other Jefferson county businesses this year. Marks Lumber was awarded Business of the Year and the Whitehall Chamber of Commerce was awarded the Community Improvement Award.
