I would not recommend this Kita to any parents looking for anything resembling the American/Anglo-style of education.
If
you expect to be informed about what the children are doing, get
regular feedback on their progress, and perhaps even have some input
into the process, this is not the place for you. If you feel comfortable
blindly trusting the Kita and just waiting patiently for some
information to make its way out, usually very inaccurate at that, you
might be happy here.
There are so many groups and teachers and
assistants, with all of them constantly shifting from room to room, and
group to group that hardly anyone seems to have a clear picture of what
is going on. The children have no chance of knowing all the staff names
and they are often interacting with people they barely know. They can't
even know all of the children they play with since they are constantly
mixing groups and to make some extra cash the Kita welcomes outside
children for short-term stays, so there is an extremely high turnover of
faces which is clearly quite confusing for the children. The Kita is
structured with 6 groups of about 15 children each and they explained to
us after much probing on our part that it's like one big family
with 6 separate rooms. They seemed quite offended when we were curious
to know exactly what our child's daily routine was, where he ate and
slept, which group he played with, which teachers he learned from, etc.
They were offended that we didn't just trust them to do the best for our
child. Some of the German parents seemed to be fine with this system,
but absolutely none of the foreign parents seemed happy with this at all
and they all seemed eager to leave (like we did) as soon as they found
other alternatives.
The issue of prices is also quite
complicated, as they keep sneaking in unexpected extra costs, and are
very unclear as to who pays what apparently, by law they have to give
some free spaces to families, and if you can't afford the asking fee
they can't really turn you down, but they never mention any of this,
they just say that everyone pays the same 273 Euro monthly fee, which is
simply not true. There are a lot of strange financial issues with this
Kita, but those were by far the least of our concerns.
The price
you pay covers a lot of art supplies which means that your children will
bring home many art projects usually done by their frightened, barely
audible army of interns rather than by the children themselves. They
also have no playground
and often go to a polluted playground right in between two highways and several underpasses (ask them for all of their playground locations to
confirm this).
They do have some upscale amenities and there was
a first impression of kindness and sweetness, but that all turned on a
dime as soon as we decided to leave and the overall experience left us
with the impression of a 4-star horror hotel.
We had our child
there for about a year and a half and things were always cordial and
fine, but once we told them we were leaving things became so horrific to
the point that we literally started fearing for the well-being of our
child. The week after we cancelled our contract (fully within the time
allotted by the contract) our son came home twice with dog-poo on his
clothes (!), even though that never happened to him before in the entire
18 months he was there. Coincidence? Perhaps. But read on. A few days
later we picked him up and he was extremely weak with high fever, the
highest he ever had there, and when we asked why they didn't call us to
pick him up earlier, they said they didn't notice Coincidence? They
even started interfering with other parents at the Kita and trying
to stop them from having contact with us, twice 'accidentally losing'
invitations to birthday parties which other parents gave them to give
us. And then on our final day of the Kita the owner actually suggested
that we not invite any of 'their' children to birthday parties, or
attend their parties since it could be confusing for the children. Both
we and the other parents obviously found this to be absurd and have
stayed in touch until today, but the fact that this Kita would try to
actively interfere with what 'their' children were doing outside of
school was quite shocking for the German parents as well.
The
teachers who also seem quite afraid of the their bosses (some of them
literally shiver when they have to read their little speeches at the
parent-teacher evenings) are also not allowed to tell you their
personal opinions and direct any questions about your child to the head
teacher (we were informed of this rule by our son's favorite teacher).
The Kita didn't even tell any of the teachers that we were leaving
until the very last day, so none of them had any chance
to say goodbye. We just assumed that they knew we were leaving but the
Kita kept is absolutely secret. In any other Kita, when a child read more
