My first enrolled my daughter in Vision 21's Torrance branch on May 26, 2012. The owner Mrs. Kim…read moremade the class schedule and insisted that my daughter needed to be in the track program, which included a portfolio completion guarantee, college essay workshop , access to financial aid information, and help with college applications. The track program consisted of 350 classes, all of which Mrs. Kim demanded prepaid checks for.
With college applications due on January 1, we gave our portfolios to the Vision 21's headquarters, where they were to be photographed. They informed us they would bring both the CDs and the portfolios back on the Jan. 27th or 28th. They later changed the date to the 31st, the day before applications were due. Some of the pictures were incorrectly taken, and all of them had terrible quality. They demanded us to have the photographs taken exclusively by Vision 21, and then charged us $300 for photographs I could have taken better at home.
I sent my daughter to class on the 3rd, only to discover that the lights were off and the door locked. It was only when we called LA branch that we were told that since the student's portfolios had been completed, all classes at the Torrance branch were canceled permanently.
Not only this action violate the portfolio completion guarantee, since the students still were working on various projects and also had other college applications due later in January and February, but my daughter still had over 70 classes left. Not only that, I found my last prepaid check cleared the previous day on January 2nd. I called Mrs. Kim to ask about the canceled classes and mentioned the cleared check. She replied rudely that she didn't know and didn't care. I told her that the students were not yet done with their portfolios, and to open up the classes that we paid for. She told us that she would reopen Saturday classes only. I called her again to ask for all the classes, Wednesday-Saturday, back. She promised to reopen all of them but when we arrived the next Wednesday for class, there was no teacher.
Both I and the other parents kept calling Mrs. Kim to open all the classes back. She agreed to meet on Saturday to discuss the classes and to bring back the portfolios. When she heard we had reported this story to the newspapers, she told us that Friday's class was canceled. On Saturday, all of the parents gathered at the Torrance Branch and waited for her. However, she did not show up--she sent her husband instead. He did not even bring the student' portfolios. We told him our situation and asked him to reopen the classes. He didn't seem to understand how important this was to us, he just turned a blind eye to our problems and kept asking "why are you complaining so much?" He then told us that classes were all canceled.
That night both Mrs. Kim and her husband came to our house with the portfolios. They forced us to sign a ridiculous contract that stated we had received the portfolio. They then wanted us to sign yet another contract that would open up all the classes. However, they attached a clause that stated " no complaints and no claims." By this time, we were sick of her manipulative ways and her ridiculous contracts. We also realized that this clause was a convenient way of muzzling us so we couldn't talk about all the atrocious things she had done until now, so we refused to sign it. Yelling again, she told us there were no more classes. (Pretty obvious, by this point). I didn't hear from her again until Monday, when she left a message saying she had confirmed my daughter had no more classes left, when I know for a fact my daughter had more than 70 classes left.
Bottom line: It is a shame this kind of business has been running in America without restriction for over ten years. Using students' love of art and desire to learn against them, this business continues their scamming and exploiting. Think twice before sending your kids here!
