They say, if you can't say anything nice, don't say anything at all, but that doesn't make for a very informative review. Still, I will try to be brief.
Our daughter attended The Bridge School for 5 months. We found the following issues:
- There is a lack of communication between the teachers.
- There is little to no support for toilet training, and no regular toileting habits are practiced.
- There is little to no structure, specifically in the 2's and 3's "classroom."
- When our daughter had an accident (pooped in her underpants), the poop was sent back home to us.
- Our daughter was denied food on three occasions.
We were told that the school does not *do* potty training. Fine. However, once our daughter started wearing "undies", the school continued to put her in diapers, even though she fought the diapering and we told them that she was accident-free at home. On two occasions, she was put in a diaper that was not changed. When I came to get her at school one afternoon, I could see just by looking at her that she had a thoroughly saturated diaper. The teachers did not even know that she was wearing a diaper. The naptime teacher had not told them. This tells me that there is a lack of communication, as well as a general lack of toileting habits. They should have known she was wearing a diaper because they should have checked out of habit, or they should have brought all the children to the toilet at a particular time (as I know they do at other preschools).
We finally got them to stop putting her in diapers. Then, when she had an accident in which she pooped in her undies, the teachers bagged up the undies with the solid poop and sent them home. While I do not expect the teachers to wash her undies, I do expect them to dump the solid waste into the toilet. Leaving poop tied up in plastic grocery bags is totally unacceptable and unhygienic. (There's a receptacle outdoors for pooped-in undies, although our daughter's undies were most often left in her cubby.)
Our daughter was told that she could not eat her cereal bar (which the teacher deemed "a cookie") until she ate her applesauce. This was not acceptable to us, and we informed the staff of this. However, twice more, our daughter was not allowed to eat her cereal bar until she ate her applesauce. The teacher's response when we inquired about these incidents was that she had said no such thing. A 3-year old makes up a lie like, "I didn't eat my lunch because my tummy hurt;" she does not make up the lie, "I didn't eat my lunch because Miss X told me I couldn't eat my cereal bar until I ate my applesauce." read more