Friends Early Learning Center

If you were to ask me years ago, if Friends was worth sending your child to, I would’ve answered it almost instantly with “Yes”! Since then, the last 2-3 years, new management has ran this place into the ground. Specialty teachers are no longer employed and it has become a glorified babysitter facility with little care for children in terms of their education and growing needs. Staff, my daughters last year, was cycled through every few weeks. All “original” staff members were laid off or resigned as it slowly deteriorated. They STILL don’t have a glorified teacher to help with Pre-K after more than a year. A YEAR! Children often have no shoes, run around non-stop with no organization or daily activities beyond the necessities. My daughter, when attending, wasn’t allowed to have items like ketchup or cheese on certain foods or at all. Safety. This should be the easiest for this facility to maintain as they have security keypads, but they decide that leaving doors partially cracked to more quickly transfer between buildings is more important. Some days the front door can even be seen open due to “smells”. They’ve had numerous gas issues over the past few years on top of it all. Until this facility starts to focus more on hiring good staff, training them appropriately and taking better care of children, it’s likely to slowly tumble into state ran or closed. When our daughter still attended, bringing these safety concerns up to staff just resulted in temporary fixes and no real follow up. They would then go back to being issues in 1-2 weeks. Leadership would be snarky and respond with quick comments instead of realizing that there’s plenty of room to improve. Avoid at all costs.

We absolutely love Friends! Our daughter has been going there since she was four months old and she is now almost 2 1/2. They do a great job of having fun activities, thoughtful lesson plans and working with each individual child’s skill set. Recently, our son has started going to Friends in December. He is 5 months old now and can show emotion, and he absolutely lights up every day we drop him off to both Ms Amys. I am so thankful for such loving ladies. I also like that the infant room is beautiful, bright and very interactive for the first year of development. They also use the Brightwheel app so we are able to see what our children are doing each day/pics/videos and all activity - gives great peace of mind. Overall, we are very happy with Friends. My husband and I had visited many daycare facilities around town when we first started looking. We chose Friends because of the warm and welcoming feeling it had and we just knew it would be a good fit for our family. Thank you Clara and your team for providing such a safe and happy environment for our babies.

I highly recommend Friends Early Learning Center. Clara Stalvey, the owner is a caring and very approachable person. Dani Lawrence as the new Director, is always present and very supportive of her staff, the children, and their families. She is a welcome addition! Congratulations to the great staff at Friends on maintaining the highest, Level 4, Paths to Quality rating.

Our daughter started at Friends when she was 8 weeks old and remained there until she was 15 months old. We had such a wonderful experience sending our daughter there. She was loved and was very well cared for. They have an app you can download where they can share pictures with you, note what and when baby ate, etc. With our daughter being our first kid, we didn’t know what to expect and they helped coach us along. They helped her work toward whatever goal we were working on at home. We no longer need childcare and were so sad to pull her away from her friends but we would choose them again if we need childcare.

I just wanted to mention that my two daughters attended Friends and experienced the highest standard of care and nurturing. The teachers encouraged their development, and prepared them for school. Ms. Amy, Ms. Heathers, and Ms. Jasmine have touched our hearts and I will forever remember their hard work and kindness, and for giving my children one-one attention, crucial to their social and emotional development. Much love to the friends and the staff at Friends Early Learning Center.