Disgruntled Former Employee Making Business Operations Difficult

I believe that I already know the answer but thought that I would ask anyway. I want to add that in hindsight things that my wife and I did were mistakes.

For those that are not familiar a childcare director for at a facility as small as ours is responsible for reviewing billing documents and HR responsibilities for our 40 some enrolled children and 5-7 staff size. It is industry standard to have access to these documents.

My wife and I own a small childcare center and have recently accepted our now former Directors resignation. My wife had worked with this woman at a previous job and was amazing when she worked with her them and so it made sense to bring her on to the team as our director when we opened up and she was great. After a few months she ended having some personal issues with several family members passing away in a short amount of time and some relationship issues with her partner at home. Obviously, this was very upsetting for her and we gave her as much time off as she needed, which she ultimately did not take much time off as she said "Working takes her mind off of her problems". These events were happening during the month of November and through the holiday season. I understand it is tough to go through that time without your recently deceased family members. My wife and I were initially able to accommodate her needs and her anticipated decline in performance given her traumatic month of November.

Also during this time, we were preparing for an assessment from an accreditation agency which would increase our revenue significantly from our state sponsored revenue sources which my wife and I was primarily focused on as opposed to the day-to-day operations of the business. That is why we have a director. '

In January her attitude kept getting worse and worse, her relationships with our families and staff were breaking down. She would threaten to quit if we try to talk to her about a mistake that she made or blow up over a question. One time we asked her why when she would drive the van that we pick up our school age children that our fuel cost would double which was met with "Now your saying that I cant drive!?!". We would talk her off her ledge and she would apologize and share whatever drama was eating at her and we would move on. In hindsight we should have ended her employment here.

At the beginning of February, to address the needs of the business we needed to bring on another employee and one with more experience that could be someone that could be a center designee. If you are not familiar this person is essentially a shift lead who is in charge if the owners and director is not present on site. The director felt very threatened by this. It was at this point that my wife and I began to strategize how we are going to offboard our director as her behavior and her mistakes were to egregious for us to manage. Families can be extremely sensitive to changes in staff so we need to be careful how we do it.

On Monday she was informed that we would be having a sit-down closed-door conversation with her, unfortunately that did not happen as the needs of the business had to come first and we had rescheduled the conversation to the following day. I was aware at the time this was not good.

Tuesday comes and she is frantic. She ends up going home in the morning and then begins to blow up my wife's phone which she could not really talk to her as my wife was in a classroom watching children as we waited for our next teacher to begin her shift. My wife explained this to her and after a few more calls and incredibly unprofessional comments later, we accepted her resignation as she was becoming an extreme liability for us. Moments later she walks through our front door with her key in hand to collect her items and on the way out she states that she is going to be calling our state regulatory agencies "Since you fucked me over, I'm going to fuck you over". She then proceeds to start calling parents and staff to talk about problems that our company has had. The context that she was leaving out is that she was the one who was responsible for those issues.

We believe that she knew the writing was on the wall for her because when Childcare Licensing (because she called them), showed up the following day to review specific documentation those items were missing. Only she had access to those documents and less than a month earlier they were reviewed by childcare licensing and were found to be perfect. It was quite obvious that they were tampered with. Upon licensing doing their investigations serval other complaints were substantiated due to mistakes that our former director was responsible for such as billing for children that were not on our sign in and out sheets and leaving children on the bus. She never told us about these mistakes and instead covered them up. These mistakes which we could of addressed in the moment with minimal repercussions but now probably going to raise our insurance rates and potentially lose our contract with our state funded revenue sources because of her.

Friday was payday and due to her calls that she made it delayed our payment to be able to make payroll from our normal payroll account so we had to pull money from other accounts to make payroll by issuing paper checks instead of direct deposit. Around 9am she comes in asking about her paycheck, I detail to her that because of the consequences of her actions your paycheck will not be coming vie direct deposit and instead a paper check and I will have it within an hour and a half because I need to go to the bank. She then says that she has been recording me and is going to take me to the labor board because I just admitted on camera that I would not be paying her. Obviously, that was not true. My wife comes into the office and tells her that she needs to leave which she doesn't. We repeated that she needed to leave several more times which she doesn't. We open the door and she bumps into the it and my wife and quickly says that we assaulted her and call the police. They show up and after about 30 minutes of talking with them I run to the bank to get her paycheck, which was supervised by the police. We were not cited for assault, but she was cited for trespassing.

From what we have experienced and what staff and most parents are telling us we do not believe that she will not stop until we go out of business. She knows enough about our business and the industry to hurt us. That is why she is doing what she is doing. Licensing knowing exactly where to look because she knows where the skeletons are hidden because she hid them.

My wife received a text this morning from a parent saying that she will not be bringing her two boys back to us. Knowing this parent she did not put together this text it read very much like our former director.

The state agencies have been generally sympathetic to us because she is a disgruntled employee who covered up her mistakes instead of reporting them when they happened but none the less these issues did happen, and it is the business who bears the consequences not the individual who caused them. We are looking into charges of theft for the missing documents, but she really doesn't have anything to lose. As I said she will continue to drag our name in the mud and bog us down in regulatory issues that she was responsible for.

The was an amazing person but since November she seemed to become psychotic, and we are genuinely concerned for her well-being. We didn't fuck her over, her performance and attitude became poor, and she felt threatened by someone we are looking to onboard.

Do we have any options to get her stop?