If you are considering the Goddard School of Sparks Maryland as a daycare for your child(ren), you may want to think twice. My husband and I selected this daycare because of its great reviews and other parents telling us how wonderful it was. However, we found that the Goddard School of Sparks did not meet our expectations. We were constantly called about minor illnesses and trivial incidents. We would take our children to the pediatrician who was astounded that a daycare would send a child home for such a small thing. Staff, and more specifically the directors, make a lot of medical accusations that are consistently wrong. Leading us and many other parents to argue with the directors, which we saw more than a few times, in the office or in the parking lot. The directors would also not respect doctors notes, and despite a board certified pediatrician writing that a child is ok to return to daycare/school, they would still force children to stay home. It is difficult to think of how many times our children were in a full week of daycare from the ages of 6 months to 2 years without receiving a phone call.
One of the more concerning things for us was the fact that we were told, "to not to have long conversations (which was considered more than asking about their day) with the teachers about your child, since the teachers are busy at drop off and pick up." Which makes no sense since the teacher is in the classroom with your child for hours on end, not the directors. If something is going on, I want to speak with the person who spends the most amount of time with my child. Additionally, myself and a few other parents have been told we spend too much time at drop off or pick up, which directly contradicts their open door policy. Because of these "rules" we encountered major inconsistencies between teachers and directors. Interestingly, one of the director's children was always in the front office and out of the classroom spending time with her which was ironic considering how ourselves and other parents could not spend more than a few minutes with out kids.
Classrooms are pushed to the legal max of head count with children to staff ratio. We understand this is a business, but the American Academy of Pediatrics suggests a classroom size of 8, and there are 12 kids in a classroom around the ages 2-3. That is a 50% increase over the recommended limit. Again I would expect this from a cheaper school. You would think, if this is such a prestigous school, they would be following the American Academy of Pediatrics evidence based practice information and spin this into saying "we use the American Academy of Pediatrics information to better support your child". But all they care about is your money.
We will be direct and state, the directors of this school are not qualified to be in their positions. In fact, when things got bad, they had to hire an administrative director to settle things, which speaks volumes about the three directors "who are in charge". These directors make decisions and assumptions about children, when they have no medical or childhood education training from a college or university. When our children were babies, the teachers of the first three classrooms were great, but the directors made it difficult, and we want to be clear that we have no complaints about those teachers. However, teachers from the older children's classrooms were lackluster and underqualified for what was to be expected from the amount of money we were paying per month.
Once our children were older and in the fourth classroom and upward, things became really unprofessional from the directors. Even one of the directors accused one of our children of being aggressive. And yet when we would ask what happened, they seemed to always know what our child was doing wrong and never telling us anything he was doing a great job of completing. Furthermore, whenever my eldest child was "doing something wrong" they always knew what he was doing and always somehow managed to see the bad behavior, but when our child came home with a bruise or injury, the directors or teachers wouldn't know what happened.
Another noticeable problem is the obvious teacher swapping and movement. Teachers would switch classrooms and would be placed out of their comfort zone. Teachers were used to a certain age group would be placed in a different age group. This would lead to problems with the children because the teachers didn't know how to handle problems or situations and it lacks consistency for children.
When considering the Goddard School's child to teacher ratio, the teachers should be more interactive with the kids when outside. Many times we came outside to pick up our kids, and all the teachers are in a large group talking to one another, ignoring the children. We would have expected this at a cheaper school, but not a higher end school, which the Goddard School claims to be. And if something was to read more
