My child attended this preschool for 9 months, she started at 2.5 years old and was 3 when she left.
Pros:
- Nice facility, beautiful playground adjacent to Rengstorff park, with large trees that provide shade
- They sometimes go play in the park, go visit seniors at the next door senior center
- The 2-year old class teachers (Wendy and Qiao Qiao) did a good job at helping finish the toilet training
- There are additional activities (soccer, math, dance) offered by 3rd party companies that come to the site (but at extra cost, parents have to enroll and pay those companies directly)
Cons:
1) When my child moved to the 3-year old class she started complaining about being hit and pushed by other kids. The teachers were very laid back when it came to injuries, they did not always attend to kids who cried when they got hurt, nor report injuries. I personally don't mind little bumps and scratches, but any injury to the head or neck should be reported, which was not in two occasions (that I know of) for my child. Another kid hit her head with a rock, and the teachers said they were not aware of it. It is a bit concerning when your kid shows up with a bruise on her head and teachers don't know what happened and did not report it. They are not trained to diagnose concussions, bringing a person quickly to the hospital after a head trauma can make the different between life and death. From my child's experience, they were not paying enough attention, at least in the 2 known occasions that my child had head injuries, to take action quickly in case of head trauma (which is not always obvious to identify from the child's behavior).
2) After joining that school, my child started giving order at home like "Mom, bring me some milk RIGHT NOW!", or if she tried to get my attention while I was doing something and did not answer right away she would say "Mom, I'm talking to you!". Two-Three years old is an age when children tend to repeat a lot of what they hear, so if teachers use phrases like that with the kids, it is a sure thing that kids will repeat it at home.
3) Their finance department is struggling and it is causing waste of time or money for the parents. They also had a hardline approach (as documented in their policies) of refusing child care if payment was not made in full by the 5th of the month, even when the finance department had made a mistake (over charge) and did not respond to parents' emails nor address the issues on the phone (in our case, the person who answered always had to consult another person, but never called back).
In our case, they have made 4 mistakes (sometimes by $300+) over the 9 months that my child attended. They don't itemize invoices, so there is no detail for the extra charges, just the total amount for that month. They were very unresponsive when we tried to contact them to get explanations. Their finance department is located in Redwood City, so parents can't just drop by their office when they drop off their child.
The only way I was able to get a response from their finance person was to hold payment.
However, in September they changed their policy and now require all parents to set up an automatic withdrawal from their bank account, or an automatic charge to their credit card with an additional 3% credit card processing fee - which they did not charge for prior to Sept 2017 (that's in addition to their 3% annual tuition increase).
It now seems that the only way parents have to get a response from the finance department is to give their 30-day termination notice and cancel the ACH with the bank.
We were fortunate that my child was attending part-time, and we had a nanny who was able to pick up the extra hours until we found another school, so I was able to pull my child out immediately when the finance person threatened to terminate child care, after being unresponsive to my queries for about 3 weeks.
Two days later, I got an apology email from their VP of programs, I don't know if it was damage control to avoid bad reviews, but there was still no plan to fix their financial practices. They have no plan to itemize invoices, if they take too much money from parents' bank accounts, they do not commit to fixing the problem by the following billing cycle. They do not commit to any timeframe at all for fixing their mistakes.
They seem to expect to be able to withdraw whatever amount they want from parents' bank accounts, without having to justify anything. In our case, they were not accountable for their mistakes, nor did they fix them pro-actively.
It is a nice facility, I find it very sad that a finance department can waste so much of parent's time to the point of getting parents fed up. read more