HORACE LANGFORD JR. / PVT Eighteen employees found themselves literally out in the heat Monday morning when Lil' Rascals day care locked its doors. Several, with their children, stood outside the front door after a Quest Locksmith employee changed the lock to ensure no entry. Advertisement

Lil' Rascals day care, a Calvada Boulevard child care business across from the Calvada Eye in operation since April 2003, shut its doors abruptly Monday morning when the owner apparently fell behind on her mortgage payments.

According to teacher Melissa Klave -- rudely awakened to the sudden shutdown early Monday morning when she showed up for work -- "As of this morning we're closed. Michelle (Oroslo) didn't pay her mortgage."

Some $570,000 is still owed on the facility, Klave said. An auction is scheduled to take place on the courthouse steps in Tonopah today to sell the property, she said, and Oroslo still has to meet payroll expenses for the past week.

Oroslo was not answering her cell phone when the Pahrump Valley Times attempted to call her for comment. According to Klave, she has turned it off.

The abrupt closure left more than 100 children and their parents with no immediate alternative for day care. Teachers said Monday morning that about two-dozen children were being taken to other licensed facilities, but few more could be taken in without breaching state day care regulations.

"She just recently started having all the money problems," said Klave. "The phone was cut off; final pink notices were received for past-due bills on the electricity; the water was shut off three or four times."

Rumors in Pahrump had already mounted, said Klave, that the state had shut the facility down for child abuse. Klave said she wanted to put an end to such wild speculations.

The owner of Child's Play, Pahrump's other day care facility, according to Klave, said the alleged state closure was due to Lil' Rascals' not having a director, but Klave said that was not true. Yet a third rumor had it that Oroslo came to work one day and said, "'I don't care any more.'"

That, too, was unfounded, said Klave.

What happened was less dramatic and more banal: "They didn't tell anyone," said Klave. An employee named Brandy showed up for work Monday at 5 a.m., finding Oroslo there with family members, loading up trucks with personal belongings.

"The trucks were packed full of stuff," said Klave, much of it belonging to employees.

Part-time Director Terry Labarre was also caught by surprise. Hired about two months ago, she too was taken aback Monday. "Didn't have a clue," she said.

She said she talked with Oroslo Monday morning and gained no information on what had happened.

Klave said she worked at Lil' Rascals when it first opened in April 2003. She worked there about a year before moving out of the state. In January of this year she resumed work there, alongside her sister Mary, who has worked at the day care center for almost a year.

When the two sisters got to work around 6 a.m., "The place was trashed," Klave said. "Books and paper were everywhere; Everything was gone."

The Nye County Sheriff's Office was notified and a deputy confronted Oroslo in the day care parking lot, according to Klave. She was told to bring back everything she had taken, Klave said, many items having employees' names inscribed on them -- items used for conducting child care activities.

Office manager Kim Moorman later brought all the property back, Klave said.

Moorman, who had worked for the business for two years, echoed Labarre's initial comment: "Didn't have a clue," she said when asked whether she had known what was coming.

She said she had simply gotten an early-morning telephone call "saying that Michelle had closed the day care."

When Klave arrived early that morning, she said distraught parents expecting as usual to drop off their child, found they had to make other arrangements. "They needed to go to work," said Klave. "A lot of us took their kids for the day."

Klave said some parents were owed money by Oroslo for having paid for services in advance.

"I guarantee they're not going to see that money," said Klave. "We have paychecks that we're not likely to see. The office manager had to hand-write out our pay stubs up till the last day worked because the computer printer was gone."

Employees were owed about a week's pay when the business closed, Klave said.

"We had over 100 kids that now have nowhere to go. We were pretty much at full capacity," she said. The majority of customers were on a government-assisted program, mostly single parents who have to work, she added.

Two teachers, Jessica Odell and Marilyn Green-Guinan, said there have been concerns in the past about the financial state of the facility, but they felt they were led to believe that Labarre's coming marked a change. "We were told that all we needed was a new director," Odell said.