PHILADELPHIA CHINESE ACADEMY

We love and highly recommend PCA. The language immersion works. The founder and teachers care deeply, teach and maintain order effectively, and we trust them. Our daughter is happy to go to school. While we did not seek out a Montessori education, we have come to appreciate the independence and concentration it fosters and the curricular focus on life skills, nature, outdoor play, and music.

Our daughter began her journey at PCA in the toddler classroom with Ms. Pearl, Ms. Zhou, and Ms. Liang. As this was her first experience with childcare, it took some time for her to adjust. Thanks to the teachers’ dedication and warmth, she gradually opened up and thrived. During her time there, she learned so much from simple tasks like cutting fruits to even helping guide younger toddlers in activities. After transitioning to the EC classroom with Ms. Grace, Ms. Cathy, and Ms. Yasmin, we’ve seen incredible growth in both her Chinese and English skills. She now comes home excitedly sounding out letters, eager to help with cooking, and showing increasing independence each day. We are so happy and grateful to watch our daughter blossom into the confident little rockstar she is today.

PCA has been one of the highlights of living in center city, with access to such amazing curriculum and teachers who are dedicated in creating a magical and structured learning environment. Both of my kids have grown to be beautiful, responsible, and bilingual kids and I would encourage parents to consider PCA. My daughter had issues transitioning to a highly competitive 1st grade after doing pre-K and K at PCA.

I am the spouse of AJ, who left an earlier review I feel compelled to add that our child has a physical disability: A progressive neurological disease that we were in the process of testing for while he was in school at PCA, and which was diagnosed shortly after we transitioned from the school. Despite our notifying the school of his challenges and our process, the founder went so far as to report to the state evaluators “that she didn’t think our there were any physical issues at all”; a shocking discovery for us as the parents. She additionally went so far as to tell us, on multiple occasions that our three year old was “not normal” and “attacking”. In reality, our child was physically over exerted, exhausted and over stimulated. Our child was in the school for 6 months with no issues at all. After moving up to the EC classroom, which is a significant change (double the size of space and children, more physical exertion, more academically strenuous), we received three phone calls in 6 weeks, and sudden extreme negative characterizations. I am an educator of 20 years; what we experienced was a lack of accommodations and biased stigmatization of the only visibly Black child in the school. Shockingly, Ms. Pearl, who taught him the longest and knew him the best, was never consulted in effort to understand and effectively strategize how to best address the issues. What I believe we witnessed was a business owner scrambling to protect her business at the expense of an innocent child in her care. We have transferred to a school where our child is loved, Understood, cared for and thriving. I am still so disappointed in how our child was treated at the end of his tenure at the school, and I hope no other child will be subjected to the same.

Our son attended PCA for one spring and summer semester before we relocated. We had a great experience and wish that we could have taken Gail and her staff along with us when we moved! The environment is caring and nurturing, and our son learned so much. The language immersion element is unique, and one of maybe a handful in the country that is offered along with a Montessori curriculum! We loved that the children went outside in both the morning and afternoon, had engaging daily experiences with music, and of course the suite of Montessori learning. Small adjustments could be made with new families, mainly to help manage expectations around school breaks. It's lovely that the teachers get some well-deserved time off to recharge and to further their professional development, but we felt as a new family that we were not given sufficient notice when we joined.