Parents Fear Fraud After Colchester Childcare Center Closes Suddenly
As months went by, Richards became increasingly concerned with how Breveleri operated Little Saplings. He put pressure on Richards and her husband, Ben Cadieux, to prepay tuition, offering them a 30 percent discount if they did. They ultimately took him up on the offer, shelling out around $17,000 for care through the end of 2025.
He also regularly blurred the lines between personal life and work, Richards said. For example, he asked for contributions to a GoFundMe after the brother of his girlfriend, who co-owned the center with him, died in a car accident. He also emailed families about an organic farm he had just leased, soliciting orders for eggs, chicken and Thanksgiving turkeys.
In late June, Breveleri texted Cadieux asking for a loan of $7,600 to buy a new playground set for the center, promising to pay him back the full amount, plus $2,500 interest. The strange and seemingly too-good-to-be-true offer prompted the couple to do some internet sleuthing. They quickly discovered a private Facebook group called "Scammed by Scott Breveleri." There, they found a cache of allegations dating to 2019 from people who claimed Breveleri had made off with their money.
Alarmed, Richards and Cadieux withdrew their daughter from Little Saplings in September without a plan B. They asked Breveleri to return their prepaid tuition, and he promised to refund them at the end of October. But they've yet to see the money, and they're increasingly worried that it may be gone for good.
That's because the center, which was licensed for 30 children, closed suddenly on October 23. heard from about a dozen parents who claim Breveleri owes them, collectively, more than $50,000 in tuition and deposits. Some are still looking for a new childcare option.
The Little Saplings families are not the only people to whom 27-year-old Breveleri allegedly owes money. spoke to others and reviewed text messages, court records, emails and social media messages that reveal Breveleri ran a variety of different ventures — including a landscaping business, a maple sugaring operation and a youth soccer team — that ended with unhappy customers in Massachusetts and Vermont. At least one complaint — that Breveleri was paid to do a renovation he never completed — made its way to the Vermont Attorney General's Office in February 2024. And he's been sued by a Colchester landlord, who pursued an eviction of Breveleri and his former girlfriend in May over $8,850 in past-due rent.
Breveleri did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
The state was tipped off about fraud allegations before Breveleri opened the Colchester preschool in March 2023. After it began operating, that center proceeded to rack up multiple violations of state licensing regulations. Nevertheless, the state gave Breveleri a license to operate a second center, in Morrisville, in January 2024.
Now, some parents are questioning how his facilities got licensed and whether regulators should have done more to protect families who entrusted him with their children and their money.
"I understand the state wanting to work with programs to try to keep them open," said Caitlin Kennedy, who sent her baby to Breveleri's center for several months in 2023, "but really, the issues with Little Saplings go beyond the pale."
Breveleri's financial troubles date back to at least 2019, when he was living in Hampden County in western Massachusetts. That's when Allie Pelissier hired Breveleri, who ran a company called Grizzlys Property Maintenance, to install a fence. She says she paid him $2,200 for materials, but the fence was never built. Pelissier sued Breveleri in small claims court and won, court records show, though she said he still hasn't paid her back in full.
In an October 2019 written statement to the judge in that case, Breveleri said his lack of education was partly to blame for what happened.
"I underestimated running a business as well as running a business and dating a girl with a kid at the time, got my finances and money management into a cluster of a mess as I have no business school experience just a diploma from Agawam High School," he wrote.
Pelissier's experience prompted her to create the "Scammed by Scott Breveleri" Facebook group, which now has 578 members. Multiple people in the group allege that they paid Breveleri to do work in their yards or homes that he never finished. One post is from the mother of a landlord who said he didn't pay rent. Others are from parents of children on youth sports teams he coached who claim Breveleri stole money from them.
Massachusetts court records show that Breveleri faced at least two other suits in small claims court in 2019.
When Pelissier found out that Breveleri was planning to open a childcare center in Vermont, she said she called the state's licensing office in the Department for Children and Families to warn them about him. In a statement to , the department's Child Development Division acknowledged that warning but said "there was insufficient information to deny a license at that time."
Soon after it opened in March 2023, Breveleri's center began having problems. Over the course of five visits that year, Vermont licensors recorded multiple violations of state regulations: having more children at the center than allowed; not having the appropriate staff-to-child ratio; employing unqualified staff; not requiring children to wash their hands before eating; keeping incomplete records; and having a dog at the center without a documented rabies vaccination.
As the violations mounted, Breveleri lashed out.
"I am so deeply angry with the state and how they have act towards all of us here when our staff pours absolutely everything they have each and every day into your children and everything they do for them," Breveleri wrote in an August 2023 message to families. "It is disgusting how much they harass us here and demand stuff by the next day from us."
Kennedy, a medical student, enrolled her 2-month-old at Little Saplings in July 2023 but said she pulled him after nine weeks following a series of events that felt like "a fever dream." Initially, her concerns centered around the number of days the center closed early, opened late or was shuttered completely with little advance warning — disruptions she said cost her family $2,500 in lost wages and supplemental childcare costs.
She said she was also taken aback by "bizarre" updates to the center's handbook that Breveleri required parents to sign soon after she enrolled. One of them stated that posting on social media about Little Saplings "in any bashful way" or "to possibly cause any harm or misfortune to the center" would not be tolerated and would result in termination of care and a forfeit of the tuition deposit.
In September 2023, Kennedy arrived early and found her child asleep in a bouncy seat with a bottle propped in his mouth — which led her to pull him from the center immediately. State childcare regulations say that infants are required to sleep in cribs or port-a-cribs and must be held while being bottle-fed.
Kennedy emailed and spoke with state licensors multiple times in August and September to detail her concerns. It took the Child Development Division three months before it documented the violation on its searchable database.
Not long after, in January 2024, Breveleri was given a state license to open another branch of Little Saplings, at a church in Morrisville.
Asked about the decision to allow Breveleri to open a second center, Department for Children and Families communications and operations manager Joshua Marshall wrote in a statement that the Colchester center "had challenges in the first six months of being open" that "appeared to be a combination of misinterpreting our rules and issues with staffing which did result in a serious violation." But, the statement continued, with support of licensing staff, the center "made significant progress and came back into substantial compliance by the fall of 2023."
"[The Child Development Division] did not have concerns about the care the children were receiving in the program when the licensee applied for a second license in the Morrisville program," Marshall wrote.
A former director of Little Saplings in Colchester, who worked there from September to December 2023, have concerns. Children's files were missing state-required documents, the former director said, and Breveleri regularly spoke disparagingly about both parents and state licensors. She asked not to be named to protect her professional reputation.
There was no consistency in what Breveleri charged families for enrollment fees and tuition, she said, and he regularly failed to return deposits when children left the center. Millie, Breveleri's emotional support dog, would come to school and poop on the floor in classrooms. Breveleri, she added, would leave wood and nails from construction projects in places where kids could reach them.
He failed to pay her for two weeks of work, the former director said; another former staff member also told that she is owed back pay.
"I don't know how he was able to be licensed," the former director said. "He doesn't know what he's doing."
It appears the tumult never stopped. On October 9, parents received a message from Breveleri at 2:40 p.m. instructing them to pick up their children early that day. Less than an hour before, the Colchester Police had been summoned to the center by Breveleri's former girlfriend, the co-owner of Little Saplings. According to a police report, she alleged that Breveleri had pushed her during an argument. She told police that Breveleri had abused her on other occasions, but she never reported it. The police were unable to contact Breveleri, according to the report, and no further action was taken because the woman was uninjured.
The former girlfriend has since hired a lawyer. Last week, a judge granted her a relief from abuse order against Breveleri, finding he had caused her physical harm and posed a credible threat to her physical safety.
A DCF spokesperson said the agency was aware of the judge's order, had "taken steps to ensure children are safe" and was "actively monitoring the program." The spokesperson didn't provide the specific steps taken.
Two weeks after the police visit, the Colchester center closed for good. At first, Breveleri told families that a "water issue" prompted the closure. But soon after, he emailed parents saying the rent was going up, making it "unprofitable" to run the center. He offered to hire a van that could bring the kids to the Morrisville center while he looked into renting a new space in Williston.
Breveleri's Colchester landlord, Heidi Blondin, told that there were never any water issues in the building; she had evicted him over his failure to pay rent. Meanwhile, parents noticed that in the days after the abrupt closure, Breveleri had listed many items from the center for sale on a "Plattsburgh Area Garage Sale" Facebook page.
