this school is TERRIBLE!
I had my daughter enrolled there for 1 term last year. the director is a young girl named Danielle. she is too young to be running a business and this became apparent pretty quickly!! she is overly unorganized, her web site, facebook page, emails and phone calls are NEVER returned and NEVER updated. she had no assistant in her 3 & 4 year old class and kept telling the parents how she had one the previous year and how helpful it was!! by midterm she was clearly frustrated at her own lack of ability to teach small children and keep their attention!
the web site... it looks pretty but there is information here from 2 years ago including class times and events schedules. how am i to know what is happening this year? there was even a mom that offered to keep her pages updated for free and Danielle just laughed it off. saying something like "ooohhh yeah. i really need to get my web guy to do some updating"! ya think??
the school's facebook page is touted as a place to ask her questions and keep updated with events. yet this as well is not utilized as it should be. there are messages there from the winter months over the last couple of years asking if school was closed for the day due to snow. of course she, in 2 years, hasn't made time to respond???
when you have a billing question good luck. even if your phone call is returned by the billing woman it's not going to be a pleasant experience as she is rude! and when i say if your phone call is returned that's no joke! one of the other mothers had serious billing issues throughout the term and kept asking "how do i pay you guys? i have the money but nobody is telling me what to do". she left 3 messages via email and phone per week with no response. it was finally worked out after 3 months but come on?? 3 months? the school obviously doesn't need the business if they are unwilling to collect fees when a parent is practically throwing it at them!
on one Saturday class blues fest was going on down town. not living in Hagerstown for very long i had no idea how big of a party this is. so... my husband gets up and takes our daughter to class only to be rerouted numerous times by police. finally, after parking the car 8 blocks away and walking in with our then 3 year old and getting there with 10 minutes left in class, Danielle isn't even there. needless to say my husband was furious. so when i took my child to class later in the week i asked Danielle about school being closed and why we didn't get a notification or why didn't she mention it to us last week or post it on her facebook page. she giggled like a teenager and proceeds to say "oh. i thought you guys would all notice the poster in the lobby". REALLY???
another thing i found out recently was pretty enlightening. i called the photography studio that did the girls recital photos. i had asked them if i could come in and get my photos. the nice young lady then proceeded to ask me if i had requested they be kept at the studio or if they were sent to Danielle directly. i wasn't sure and i asked if a lot of the parents had wanted to come and pick them up? the girl told me, "oh yeah. nobody wanted to go and pick their photos up from the school because they weren't going to be sending them back the next term". not surprising! all of us moms would hang out while classes were happening. conversation would inevitably turn to Danielle and how we really didn't want to bring our kids back the following term!! there were plenty of parents who took their kids out mid term!
please read this carefully: i heard, with my own ears, Danielle berate a 3 1/2 year old little girl in one of her classes on a Saturday morning!! the poor little thing was having a bad day and i watched her get down to the child's level, just a few inches from her face and say in a terrible tone, "what is your problem"!!! this chick is not good teaching children! i witnessed her, on numerous occasions, roll her eyes at the them!
the other ballet school here in town, ballet and all that jazz, is amazing! their director is there to meet you with a smile every day and everyone is so kind AND they actually teach the little ones positions, classes are fun and they are all around involved in the parents lives!! they genuinely love teaching children and, wait for it, look like they have fun doing it!!
i have to repeat myself here, do not, under any circumstances take your child to this school! do yourself a favor and take them to ballet and all that jazz. you won't regret it! let's support our local businesses that really deserve our funding and not some school that charges a premium for what Danielle likes to think is a sophisticated, a-one experience. but really it's just some young girl packaging a turd in a gold box and spraying it down with perfume... it looks OK but when you open it up it's still just a steaming pile!...
oh yeah and that tattered foam logo beside her door... classy! read more