First, let me start by saying that I I have debated for almost a year about writing this review,…read morebut I feel that it is the right thing to do. I am not customer nor will I ever be. I only hope to warn other parents of this horrible place.
I live next door to the daycare, and as a mother of two after what I've seen from them I would never put my kids in their care. I would like to warn other parents about what I've observed. If I could, I would tell parents of the kids currently enrolled there to look somewhere else for daycare.
I've lived next door to the daycare for over a year now. Here's the breakdown of what I've observed:
The first thing that bothers me is the lack of attention they give to the kids. During the kids' outside time, most of the teachers are either talking with themselves or looking at their phones. More often than not, it's really young girls on their cell phones rather than interacting with the kids. I'm not sure what the legal ratio is for teachers and kids, but there's often 30+ kids outside with about 3 teachers.
Because of this lack of attention, I've seen kids get hurt when they could have been warned or told how to safely play if the teachers would have noticed. Once I've seen little kids no older than 4 or 5 get into a physical fist fight that looked like grown men whooping each other's a**. In that incident, I was inside doing laundry and could hear them fighting near the fence of my apartment. If I could hear them from inside my apartment, what their excuse for not hearing the fight from no more than 20 feet away? I went outside to stop them, and it took me yelling at the teachers and kids for about 5 minutes before the teachers stopped their oh so important conversation to finally stop the fight.
The only teacher I have ever seen there actually take an interest in the kids was a young man, maybe early 20s or so, who would actually play with them. He organized soccer games and football games with the kids. All the kids seemed to really like him. I could tell when he was working because all you could hear was kids laughing. Usually it's a bunch of screaming and fighting.
But I haven't seen him in several months. He was so different from the other neglectful teachers, I hope they didn't get rid of him because "it wasn't working out".
Next what concerns me, is that when they do pay attention to the kids they speak REALLY harshly to the children. One woman, I think she's the main director because she's the only constant person I see, seems to always be yelling at the kids. She yells so much, I can recognize her voice from all the other teachers. And sometimes it's mean stuff. The kind of things that if my child came home and said a teacher was speaking that way to him, there would be serious problems.
Just other day, this same woman was yelling at a poor kid over some goldfish crackers he had dropped. She was screaming at him, "I'm tired of you making a mess!" and "If you drop one more goldfish you won't be getting a snack tomorrow!" which then turned into, "Well I guess you don't want a snack then! Everybody else will get their snack tomorrow but you!"
Now I admit, I didn't see the alleged mess. But I can't imagine how many goldfish crackers it would take before someone would flip out on a child like that. I may not have seen the mess, but I can tell you that the child wasn't yelling or talking back at all. The only person speaking, was the teacher yelling at the child.
That particular choice of words is what finally led me to write this after a year of debating. As a professional early development center, I expect that the teachers there at the very least would never use food as a form as punishment. Especially since food costs are associated with their rates. As a consumer and parent, if I am paying for the food my kid eats while at your daycare, I don't care what kind of mess the kid was making or what kind of trouble he is--you better feed my kid.
Don't get me wrong, I am not a perfect parent. Most of us have had a moment or two where we are not proud of our parenting. But if I am paying for my child to be cared for while I am at work, I expect that my child should be safe from verbal abuse.
The lack of respect and care for the children is hands down the most horrible thing about this place. But how they interact with everyone in our block area is terrible too. They are horrible members of our community. I could mention many, but since I don't have the space, please trust me when I say that they have been extremely rude to different residents in my complex for no good reason.
Do yourself and your children a favor and do not enroll them here. Bad all around.
