Elmside Children's School

We used to love Elmside, but communication was never there strong suit, from changing our timeslot without our permission to receiving only positive (but very unspecific) feedback about our child. When we toured the school we were told that there would always be two staff people on site. At first this was true, after one semester one of the staff people moved to another state. From then on, during the afternoon section, which hosts the older kids (4+) there was often only one adult staff person. Sometimes they had a 14 year old as their second staff person. My son started to complain of bullying as did other kids. The owner who is one of the staff people at Elmside seemed to be on duty less and less. She self proclaimed that she had been doing this for over 20 years and was getting burned out. Some of the other staff are unexperienced, have no professional training and are sometimes the only ones on site. Some of them don't have the skills to deal with normal age appropriate conflict between kids. When they had two staff people on site, kids were allowed to choose between the indoor area and the outdoor area. When they went down to one staff person, this policy did not change only now kids in one of the play areas were left unsupervised. There was an incident outside. I asked my son what happened and he said the other kids were ganging up on him. I asked the teacher what happened and she said she didn't know because she was not outside.

We were delighted when we toured Elmside and were lucky to secure a spot. We had heard wonderful things about this school. Leigh Ellen and her staff were welcoming and our son felt right at home. He made friends quickly and we were never told of any concerning behavior. After two weeks of school, we had a thorough conference and were told of some unwanted behavior. We came up with a plan to address these issues and work together to help our guy do his very best. We left this meeting with a solid plan. That afternoon our son went to Elmside and had a challenging day. When I picked him up, I was never told of anything other than it wasn’t the best day. The next morning we abruptly received an email that we were told he was no longer welcome back. We had no chance for remedy and no time to even work with our child on the behaviors. There was no concern that a 4 year old boy who has done so much transition in the past few weeks could need time and space for said transition. I explained this was uncharacteristic of him and we all wanted to work to make this work. I’m the end, this school may not have been the best for fit for him but the abruptness of being told he’s not welcome without any regard for our child’s emotions is what is the hardest pill to swallow. I would stay away from this school. If your child doesn’t fit their proper mold, they will leave you high and dry. Our child was loved and successful at other daycares in the past, this clearly is a business first and a child care center second.