Just-A-Wee Day Care Center

I really wanted to love Just A Wee. For many reasons it was a good daycare center and we loved most of the teachers that we interacted with. However, in the year we had our child enrolled, we have had a lot of issues specifically with the management of the center, unclear policies, and the longevity of the staff. Our child has had an array of 4-5 different teachers in and out of the center. A few of their teachers and aides are really wonderful, well experienced, and knowledgeable. But there’s a lot of under-qualified staff who don’t have enough experience to guide kids through developmental milestones such as learning their left foot from their right foot, zipping their coats, and potty training. Our daughter was constantly coming home with her shoes on the wrong feet, opened and leaking food containers in her bag, or missing items of winter clothing (which have been labeled per the school’s requirements). While we understand that understaffing is a difficult thing to deal with and is very difficult amongst child care and education, the switching of teachers in such a random fashion is not healthy for toddlers and children who have a hard time developmentally with changes in routine. We would go through developing a good relationship with the teacher, learning their methods, having our child become comfortable with them and making great progress, only for that teacher to either leave the school or for teachers to be switched around and we’d have to start over. We experienced some really difficult regressions in our child because she was being forced to acclimate to a whole new stranger and routine. Certain teachers were really helpful and did a phenomenal job of communicating and working with parents and kids through the transitions. Others have been much more unprofessional and distant, barely making efforts to communicate things to parents about their children. I can confirm unfortunately like some of the previous reviews, the management at this daycare is very spiteful. If you’re a parent who feels the need to ask a question or advocate for your child respectfully because you are unsure about a practice or lack of consistency with a teacher’s methods, management will start out very kind but vague. However, if you continue to ask for clarification because of vagueness, eventually you will be met with a rudeness and be blacklisted. We found emails about important information we needed to relay would be ignored for a week or more until we approached management in person basically asking them to reply. My daughter had been working on potty training with her teacher. We loved this teacher and she was so so supportive and positive. Our daughter adored her. Unfortunately, this teacher decided to move on from the center and within two weeks of the new person taking over, we received an email saying that our daughter was “not showing any signs of potty learning per their policy”. She had been doing wonderfully with the previous teacher… so why all of a sudden were they wanting to put a three-year-old back in diapers (not pull ups) and demolish months of hard work she, her previous teacher and we have been doing? An overcrowded classroom and under-qualified staff that didn’t have the capacity to assist potty training though the school prides itself on saying that potty training is a key milestone they work on… So instead of training your teachers, hiring more qualified teachers, you’re going to have the audacity to punish a preschooler? Not to mention we very respectfully replied to this email asking for clarification on this accusation that our daughter was not telling the teachers when she needed to go or even when she had an accident because she had no issues with the previous teacher. Was she uncomfortable with the new teacher, what could we do to work with her, etc. We emailed the director on March 20th. The director never replied and her teachers would conveniently not be around at drop off or pick up to discuss. I’m writing this review on April 10th and we pulled our daughter from this center last week.