Linda Chery-Valentin looks like a French fashion editor or a Vogue stylist. The chic, Haitian-born quadrilingual woman dressed in the latest designer fashions and high, high heels is the exact opposite of what you'd expect when the front door of her Jamaica Plain daycare center just outside of Boston opens. Chery-Valentin, 44, does not go in for the traditional easy-care, washable, shapeless dresses and "comfortable" shoes of the typical daycare director/founder. The foyer of Arc-en-ciel, her Jamaica Plain daycare center (there's a second one in Boston) also reflects more style than expected in this type of facility. Fresh flpwers on an antique table, art on the walls, and a video in her office showing what goes on in each classroom behind her elegant office, are as unexpected as the activities at Arc-en-ciel, which means "rainbow" in French.
"I spoke three languages growing up," says Chery-Valentin, who is fluent in French, Spanish, English and Creole, "and I believe that early exposure to a foreign language develops linguistic awareness and helps children acquire a second language later in their school years." Thus, every morning at Arc-en-ciel, a French instructor with a national diploma in early childhood education from France comes in for three hours to read stories in French, sing French songs and lullabies, and immerse the toddlers, aged two months to pre-kindergarten age, in that language for 8 to 10 hours per week. The school's graduation each May is conducted half in French.
When Chery-Valentin and her Haitian-born husband immigrated to Boston in 1985 and began looking for a daycare center for their three sons, they visited 21 facilities in Natick, where they live, and were not impressed. Chery-Valentin, who loves children, decided to open a daycare facility in her own home. After one year in operation, the daycare center was so full that they needed a larger facility, so they took over a "very sad" daycare building, according to Chery-Valentin, and made it over into a bright, cheery center with beautiful little bathrooms sized just for potty-training toddlers. That facility is still in operation, but in 2002 Chery-Valentin found a former YMCA building located on the fringes of Jamaica Plain and Brookline near Larz Anderson Park that "was a wreck," she said. She got an architect friend to build the same specially designed colorful classrooms and infant facilities and bathrooms, as well as to equip the outdoor play yards with modern state-of-the-art slides and swings and jungle gyms, and she opened to a clientele of parents most of whom are both working. In fact, 90 percent of her little clients are the children of two-doctor parents, many of them from Boston's Back Bay neighborhood. Terry Allen, a Back Bay parent whose son John attended at the age of 10 months, says that Chery-Valentin is "the best. She's smart, she's nice, she'll sweep the floor or change dirty diapers. Her staff is wonderful, too. They are all excellent with the children, and the facility is so clean. But Linda doesn't belong in a daycare; she belongs on Newbury Street."
Chery-Valentin's mother didn't think her daughter belonged in a daycare center either. The Haitian matriarch of a family of eight children, five of whom became physicians, wanted Chery-Valentin to become one as well, and she pressured her daughter until the younger woman left the country and took her first job in the U.S. bagging groceries. Then she worked as a nanny, and the family for whom she worked liked her so much that they paid for two years of her schooling at Cape Cod Community College.
"I love children," she says, "and I knew I wanted to work with them." Married for nearly a quarter century, Chery-
Valentin says "It still feels like the honeymoon."
Because most of the parents are so busy they can't visit during the week, Chery-Valentin throws breakfasts, tea parties and parents' nights at the center for them. She is at the Jamaica Plain facility before the first child arrives at 7:30 a.m. and long after they leave in the late afternoon, which means that for her, the job is a 65-hour work week. She loves the work, but keeps Saturdays for her shopping day. "On Saturday, I have my hair done, wear nice clothes, and shop," she says. In Boston she shops at Saks Fifth Avenue and Neiman Marcus and in New York, Century 21 in Battery Park, and Barneys. Her favorite designers are Armani, Gucci, Pucci and Ferragamo, and her favorite shoes are by Prada. For one Mother's Day, she asked for, and received, the green Prada shoes that she coveted. Handbags are a particular weakness, and she admitted to owning 60 of them.
Much as she loves beautiful clothes, however, she does not worry that her little clients will dirty the designer fashions. "I let them spit up on me, or whatever," she laughs, "because everything goes straight to the dry cleaners."
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