After a year at SPA, my opinion has definitely changed. At the start of the year I was so proud to have my daughter attend a school I thought was so fantastic and I raved about it to everyone. I now feel like when I was touring the school, the director talked me into enrolling my daughter and then I just accepted her pitch about the school as fact. I should have known better. It now appears to me that their "excellent scores" on pre-kindergarten evaluation are more related to the backgrounds of the kids (almost all parents are educated, upper middle class) than the expertise of the teachers. The materials used are photocopies of a preschool workbook. There were never any parent-teacher conferences. The only parent-teacher interactions were to explain an injury caused by another kid. My best friend's children have attended VPK and summer camp at a larger preschool on Military Trail where they purchase materials for each and every child (not just one book that the teacher photocopies). They do frequent student evaluations and hold regular parent-teacher conferences. And she showed me the huge notebook that they kept for her kids with schoolwork, artwork, teacher evaluations, and tons of photos of her kids! I attended a Saturday party there with her, and the administrators and all the teachers were super friendly (she said even the ones who don't teach her kids know their names!) and the environment was SO positive. They even have an art room. At the beginning of the school year I had been excited about Sunshine Park's small size (based on the director's tour) but now I can see all the advantages of the larger school: (1) the kids are separated into large, private, calm classrooms (SPA's 3 rooms are close together and noisy); (2) the professionalism of the staff comes from the corporate training (there were a *few* instances of questionable methods and practices at SPA); (3) the huge shady playground for every day play and bounce house for special events; (4) the flexibility of leaving your kids for the rest of the day, or only an hour or two, or for spring break or summer; (5) the individual attention given to students for classwork. I feel like my daughter mostly enjoyed her VPK experience at SPA (other than some cliquish behavior by a group of girls in her class), and she definitely loved Miss Sandy's personality. But I wish I had given her all the other opportunities that my friend's kids had. In my opinion, she would have been more ready for, and more excited for, kindergarten if she'd attended the other school. read more
