BW
Becky Walker
Jul 7, 2020
Our daughter went to KinderCare for about a year and a half, starting when she was about 3 months old. Of course there are positives and negatives to any child care facility, but over time the cons eventually outweighed the pros, and we removed our daughter.
We have a restricted diet, and they allowed us to bring (allergy friendly) food from home, which was great. They also allow cloth diapers. The staff is also friendly. All good things. However, there is constant turn over. Not a single person who worked there on her first day was still there on her last. Teachers are moved around from room to room, often without notice, so there was no consistency, and we might not even know who she was with.
Here are the major reasons we ultimately decided to pull our daughter from this facility (there were several other little annoyances that factored in, but wouldn't have prompted us to leave):
1. Our daughter is small, about 5th percentile, so when she moved up to the toddler room, she would always get sent back to the infant room to keep proper ratios of teacher to kids. I was told this was because she was the youngest, but I know that to be untrue, because there were younger kids than her in the toddler room. To be fair, there were times when it was her and another child, but if only one needed to move, it was always her. This happened until she was 18 months old, and was too old to be in the infant room anymore. She was slow to talk, but she's a smart kid and the infant room was not developmentally appropriate for her. This also caused her to miss her second outside time several times a week.
2. Morning dropoffs were very disorganized. We never knew which room she would be in (again, no consistency). But the biggest problem was that there were not enough teachers there early. The maximum ratio for her age is 5 kids per teacher, but I often saw 7 or 8 kids per teacher. There was one day that I counted 12 kids and one teacher, and when I went to drop her off in a room with older kids where there were fewer, I was told she "had" stay in the room that already had way too many kids.
3. I found responsiveness to be a serious issue. I brought up the concern of way too many kids per teacher and got no response, ever. I brought up the issue of her always being sent to infants instead of taking turns among kids who were young enough, and although the response I got to that was positive, nothing actually changed. I requested a policy handbook but never got one, despite being told it would be left in her folder. And on and on in the same manner.
4. This one is out of the control of the facility, but nonetheless, the last major reason for leaving was other parents. I want to be clear that this is absolutely, 1000% not a judgement of other children who attend here. There were some perfectly normal, nice people, but there were also some rather undesirable characters, too. When I say "undesirable", I mean parents who act like they want to be gangsters, or think they live in the ghetto (hello, we're in suburbia), or come in high on meth (or other drugs), etc.