I would recommend that no one put their child in this daycare. There's plenty of other good ones out there with a reasonable management team. We had my now almost 2 year old daughter in Small World Learning Center for just over 3 months. The teachers were really great and everyone seemed to love her. I don't have any issues with the curriculum or the way she was treated during her short time at SWLC. The problem I have, and it's a big problem, is with the management.
My daughter was unfairly and unjustly terminated from SWLC on the spot last Tuesday, because of an argument that I got into with the director over their COVID 19 policy. They had an issue with the way I responded to them over the phone, and their emotionally charged response, and way to say "I'll show you," was to terminate my daughter with zero notice. This by the way is ironic considering that they want 2 weeks notice to do anything there, but they could care less about how inconvenient it is for the parents when they make last minute decisions. About five days prior to her unfair termination, my daughter had come down with a cough, which she undoubtedly caught from daycare (we don't really take her anywhere else that would've exposed her). This was on a Thursday, and typically she attends Tuesday through Thursday, so fortunately we had several days for her to get well before she was scheduled to go back. I figured it was just a run-of-the-mill virus that children typically come down with and not the Corona virus. We decided to take her to the doctor on Monday just to be safe. Sure enough, they suggested we do a COVID test, and so we did. We kept her out of daycare on Tuesday and found out that afternoon that her results were negative. I did not feel the need to tell the daycare that she was sick, because I did not want them to overreact, especially knowing that she did NOT have Corona virus. She attended daycare on Wednesday and it was just an ordinary day. On Thursday when she was brought in her mother decided to tell them that we had taken her to the doctor for a cough where she took a COVID test returning negative results. Kaila (one of the directors) said that it was fine and to just have the doctor fax over the test results, which we did.
Kaila was clearly unaware of their own policy, a policy which she would later flaunt and note my failure to comply, because she called me 3 hours hours later to tell me that even though my daughter had tested negative, she would have to stay home for 14 days! This made me furious, because both her mother and I work, and this was going to be very difficult to accommodate. To me this makes absolutely no sense, and on top of that they still wanted to charge us for the days they were going to force her to stay home. I found out shortly after that the policy said 10 days after initial COVID symptoms, of which she really had none except for a wet (not dry) cough, so they still didn't know what they were talking about. Apparently they had decided to follow the COVID decision making tree set forth by the state of Minnesota only now. Had she known this policy, she would have denied my daughter entry into the daycare that morning, but she didn't. It couldn't have been that important since this was brought up after the fact. I exchanged a few words with them and hotly expressed my dissatisfaction, saying that we never would've told them had we known they were going to do this. I was working while she called me, but I called about 45 minutes later to discuss the policy and Rachel (one of the other dictators) answered with "are you outside?" I replied that I was at work and that I couldn't get her. She told me I only had an hour to pick her up, which was news to me because in our initial conversation absolutely nothing was said about picking her up early that day. I said her mother would have to get her and asked (somewhat sarcastically, I'll admit. I still wasn't happy about this) what would happen if we didn't get her. She replied that they would start calling emergency contacts. Fine. Our daughter was picked up by her mother about 1 hour and 20 minutes after the initial phone call. When she picked her up she met by one of the teaching staff who had all of our daughters belongings and she was informed that this would be her last day. Kaila (the director) did not even have the common decency, or courtesy to come out and tell her herself. We were completely shocked. It is ethically wrong to terminate a child because their parent has an issue with the policy. I am considering pursuing legal action against SWLC.
They have also had issues regarding pay with multiple other people. The only thing that seems to matter to them is money. Had they not had someone lined up to take her spot, they would not have expelled my daughter, but they did and they would have no lapse in tuition. Bottom line: do not mess with this place. Take your children elsewhere. read more