The Walmart Home Office is set to officially open in 2025, but some elements of the nine block facility are already open and running. That includes their Whole Health Fitness Center, which opened earlier this year. Just across the street is another space that is up and running, at least at some capacity: Little Squiggles Children’s Enrichment Center.
The executive director for Little Squiggles is Lauren Floyd.
“We’re really proud to serve Walmart Bentonville Home Office employees,” Floyd said. “So we serve Walmart and Sam’s Club.”
Before this, Floyd served as the director of the Sam’s Club Kids Club, just a few blocks south on the Sam’s Club Home Office campus in Bentonville. At both locations, Walmart works with Bright Horizons who manages and staffs these facilities.
The space is enormous. The facility is spread across two different buildings, measuring 76,000 square feet.
“A [Walmart] Neighborhood Market is 36,000 square feet,” Floyd said. “So that kind of gives you a good visual. I'm a pre-school teacher, so I need spacial reasoning like a puzzle to understand things. So to me, that makes sense as a puzzle.”
This space is nowhere near capacity right now. There are currently 248 children enrolled, with a capacity of 516. Floyd said they are being intentional about opening up the spaces.
“And we do that for the success of children, families, and staff,” she said. “We're not going to put 500 kids in here day one. It's not a successful way to provide high quality care. I think that's been a challenge because people are so eager and excited. And so we are having to say, ‘Hey guys, we're coming, it's coming. What we're here, we're here for you and we'll promise we'll get to started as soon as we possibly can. We're actively working on that as we speak.’ Yet sitting in peace knowing we're providing high quality care.”
Floyd took us on a walking tour of the facility.
“As we enter this hallway, it's two hallways,” Floyd said. “If you look down this hallway, you'll see five infant rooms on one side and five toddler classrooms on the other. We have our kitchen here. And one of the wonderful things about our kitchen is as I do family tours, I say, ‘your child will eat better than you most days and I'm not kidding.’ They're amazing cooks. Tmeals a day, our serve tier for our children as well. You'll also see our buggies over here. It's a huge aspect of getting our kids out into nature, right? Walmart has their concept for a new campus that's called Little Nature Big Nature. And how do we make Little Nature and Big Nature happen all over? We were already doing that. So that partnership completely made sense for Bright Horizons and Walmart. And so they will get out. They go out within this area right here. Right now would be on campus, meaning our building. But when campus is done, they'll take little walks. We have our older kids who will wear little walking vests and walking ropes.”
Because the space is less than 50 percent full at this point, some of the rooms are still empty. But inside of each one, you can see the intentionality of the space — from the toys and furniture to the floor-to-ceiling-windows and laminate wood flooring.
Floyd introduced us to one of their Infant Movement Matter Zones. “It's a gross motor space,” she said. “We know that no child or adult wants to be in a room all day. I can't tell you how many Walmart parents are so excited about Home Office, because they say, ‘My kids have windows. We don't have windows in our offices. We're ready for campus.’ So it just is another space for them to get outside of the room and really move their bodies.
“Individual care is what we believe in,” she continued. “So we really believe in meeting a child in a family what they're at. Every child deserves to be served early learning. And it is our goal as Bright Horizons. It is Walmart’s goal as an employer to ensure that the children of their employees are able to have the highest quality of care to meet those developmental needs. We also believe in safe risks. I can't help but say that. So you'll see a mixture of soft surfaces and our hard surfaces. And sometimes parents are like, ‘Well, what if they fall? These are littles.’ We say, that’s okay. We've made it safe space for them to fall and learn how to get back up. And that's part of learning as well.”
Each of the rooms has a door that leads outside, giving kids and their instructors the space to explore the “little nature.” As we make a hard turn to our right, we go down another hallway for slightly older kids: four classrooms for two- and three-year-olds, four pre-school classrooms, and one kindergarten prep classroom. One of the pre-school rooms is enjoying outdoor time.
Another outdoor space Floyd is proud of is their garden. She says this space is an enrichment area to enhance their learning experience.
"Kindergarten prep is measuring these as they grow,” she said as she pointed to a row of gourds. “They're talking about what they need in the soil. Our little-bitties talk about textures and what it feels like and is it cold and is it hot. And all those really basic cause and effect [skills]. If we don't water the plant, what's going to happen? Really, really interesting topics to little-bitties, to really ignite the love of learning.
“Then we have our beds down on the end,” she continued. “Oh my goodness, in the summer, we harvested so many pickling cucumbers. I have so many pickles in my refrigerator right now. I don't know what to do with. But right now, we have some bell peppers, our tomatoes are growing, and then all along here are blueberry bushes. We had four over at Sam's Club Kids Club and they saw how much we loved them, and they went a little crazy and I absolutely love it. When they were blooming, they would come out here every morning and just eat them off the vine. They pick the tomatoes off the vine, too and so it's hands-on learning.”
Miranda Bullington is an instructional coach with Little Squiggles. Her family has oscillated back and forth between Colorado and Arkansas over the years, but she’s staying put in Bentonville now. Bullington taught in the public school system, created educational resources for teachers, and has her degree in early childhood education. She says she felt like she wanted to get out of the public education world for a bit, and when she saw the listing for this position, she had to take it.
“Really where I want to be is in the preschool area,” Bullington said. “I say that because of how the brain is developing and how these are the absolute most formative years. My passion is social emotional learning. This is where they play, and then public school is very different. In kindergarten, we hit the ground running, so if we can prep them here for a love of learning — in addition to learning sharing, we've learned the sitting still, we've learned all those smaller pieces that make such a big difference in public. We're just building on each skill. To me that's where I see the biggest difference, is here we're forming that love of learning. We have parents who are paying for their kids to be here, so to me at some point it's a choice. You're choosing to be here, you're choosing to allow your kids to love school and to be with teachers who love them and to prep to hit the ground running whenever you get to elementary school.”
In Charles Fishman’s book The Wal-Mart Effect, he describes the research of Emek Basker, an economist at MIT who is trying to answer the question of the effect on the availability of jobs in the immediate area of a Walmart. Her research is complicated, but the short version is this: When a Walmart comes to town, it creates jobs. But, it also destroys jobs.
A similar concern may exist around Little Squiggles; that by opening a childcare facility with the capacity for more than 500 children, it could harm other smaller facilities. Floyd said their estimates shows that their facility will actually open up the childcare market in northwest Arkansas by 15%.
“We serve who we serve so that others can serve who they can serve,” Floyd said. “We need people to work in other places than Walmart to for Walmart to be Walmart right and they need care for their children as well and so I think that we're only allowing these other locations to be able to serve more the community as well.”
At this time, Little Squiggles has not indicated if they plan to someday open enrollment to Walmart or Sam’s Club employees in northwest Arkansas outside of Home Office employees. Monthly tuition rates range from $1,117 to $1,258. Officials with Walmart said in a statement, “we have carefully structured our pricing to align with the standard market rates for childcare in this region. This service is part of Walmart’s commitment to providing valuable benefits to our associates.”
Ozarks at Large transcripts are created on a deadline. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. The authoritative record of KUAF programming is the audio record.
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