Description: The Goddard School uses the most current, academically endorsed methods to ensure that children have fun while learning the skills they need for long-term success in school and in life. Our talented teachers also collaborate with parents to nurture children into respectful, confident and joyful learners.
Where possible, ChildcareCenter provides inspection reports as a service to families. This information is deemed reliable, but is not guaranteed. We encourage families to contact the daycare provider directly with any questions or concerns, as the provider may have already addressed some or all issues. Reports can also be verified with your local daycare licensing office.
| Type | Inspection Dates | Reports/Citations |
|---|---|---|
| Complaint | 2021-11-03 | COMPLAINT INVESTIGATION REPORT |
| Complaint | 2020-08-14 | COMPLAINT INVESTIGATION REPORT |
| Inspection | 2019-07-16 | FACILITY EVALUATION REPORT |
| Inspection | 2018-09-21 | FACILITY EVALUATION REPORT |
| Summary | 07/16/2019, 09/21/2018 | Type B Citation: 1; |
|
*Type B citation is for a violation that, if not corrected, may become an immediate risk to the health, safety or personal rights of clients. Examples include faulty medical record keeping and lack of adequate staff training. |
||
If you are a provider and you believe any information is incorrect, please contact us. We will research your concern and make corrections accordingly.
Write a review about Goddard School, The. Let other families know what’s great, or what could be improved. Please read our brief review guidelines to make your review as helpful as possible.
This school has beautiful facilities and I believe is the newest daycare / preschool in Rancho Cordova. However, we found great differences between each classroom, with wide variations in quality, and the preschool was extremely disappointing.
Our child had various issues on the way through his time here. Some of them seemed structural. There is a lot of staff turnover in the school and there are also a lot of “floater” staff going around the school to each room as needed to keep the legal ratio of children per adult. Therefore it was not always possible to know who was with our child during the day. While she seemed happy enough with most of the lead teachers, she (and we) did not like that there were so many random teachers coming in and out during the day. A few times we showed up to pick her up and we had no clue who the supervising teacher was (and neither did she; it is a big school and there were a large number of teachers she didn’t recognize or know names of). One issue also apparently caused by the teacher turnover and floaters was that they really didn’t know the children and so they were not aware of things like food allergies and other such individual needs of the children in the room. Our child was given foods she was allergic to several times, and she was not the only child we know that this happened to. There were also two incidents of children being left out on the playground without supervision since the school opened and I believe that these were both incidents involving new or temporary staff. Other issues were smaller , such as often when I would pick up my child, nobody could tell me how long she had napped because of the teachers / floaters switching in and out of the room during that time. We also saw floaters in the infant room being corrected on how to safely deal with the babies.
Many of the things we really liked at first sight turned out not to be quite as advertised. We were always promised a well-planned transition between classrooms, with the child spending a bit of time in the new room before moving, and the child moving with a group of friends. This did not always happen and some of the transitions were made more difficult than necessary. The school promises to write down what the child eats and how long they nap, but we found that this diverged widely from what we found leftover in the lunchbag or what our son told us on pickup. Each day the teacher hand-writes a comment on the child’s daily sheet, and invariably it comments on what a great day they had. Unfortunately, this was written even when the child had a rough or troublesome day, which made us suspicious of the accuracy of reporting.
We worked through these issues because we could not find another daycare for our son, and because we trusted most of the lead teachers in the school. The school is very conveniently located and physically comfortable. But when our child reached preschool age the problems became worse. In the preschool class the ratio of student to staff is 1:12, and although (as we were reminded many times by the administration) this is legal ratio, it is a lot of children for two teachers and the classrooms did not seem under control. There was a lot of rough play, fighting, and bad language coming home with our child, but when we discussed this with the administrators they said that they couldn’t do anything about it. The napping policy in this room was also problematic. Unlike other childcare centers there is no separate area for children who wake up early or only need short nap. Our child, who only needed a brief hour of nap, if that, was required to remain on the mat for the entire three hours of naptime, with the lights off. The teachers within the classroom attempted to work with us to find some way of making this less awful for our child, but the administration was unsupportive and it was clear that they had no interest in accommodating individual children’s needs.
Pedagogically there were also a lot of problems in the preschool area. There was no individual or even small group teaching or supervision within this classroom. Our child was expected to work out himself how to form the letters to write his name each day. When we asked who was teaching him the letter strokes, we were told that parents needed to supervise their children doing the task on drop-off, because there were too many children to do this individually. Therefore our child learned to write her name completely incorrectly, and now she is having to re-learn how to do it. (We know other children who also learned incorrectly and now have to re-learn, at least one of whom was withdrawn from the school because of it.) Having now toured six other preschools, I also now know that writing names is not usually considered an age-appropriate activity for a just-turned-three-year-old. On the other hand, age appropriate activities such as phonics were not taught in this class. Most other preschools teach phonics, numbers, etc., according to an established curriculum (such as Zoo Phonics), but there seemed to be no rhyme of reason, and certainly no curriculum, to the activities in the Goddard preschool class. (The school makes a huge deal out of having 4-year-degree teachers, however, they are not necessarily pre-school trained, and we definitely saw the difference in this and other centers we toured.) We were told by the administration that learning was done mainly via “centers,” where the children move around the room selecting activities for themselves. However when we observed the classroom we saw that not all children actually did the activities laid out and which were listed on the child’s daily sheet, and not all “centers” (some of which included activities such as writing, tracing, etc.) were supervised. This seemed to create problems rather than effective pre-school learning; for example, my child knows many of the letter names, but this is now severely impeding her ability to jump into reading because she is having to re-learn each letter phonetically. It seemed to us that the teachers, while doing their best, were extremely overworked and expended most of their energy on keeping the very large classroom under control. In the preschool class on drop-off we witnessed children left crying for their parents and remaining unattended; the teachers simply could not spread themselves across the need of the number of children in order to take care of them.
Our child pretty much hated the preschool experience at this school. Every day we had to drag her there and she became shy, withdrawn, and difficult. She has since started another preschool and is a different child – engaged, confident, calm, no resistance to going there. We hope that her next school will allow her to flourish and be nurtured and learn to love school as we wish her to; we regret that we left her at Goddard so long. My advice to parents considering this school would be to tour the school during class hours, and insist on meeting the individual teachers as well as the administration. The “open houses” do not show the full story about this school and you should try and see the school in action throughout the day. It was a real shame for us to feel forced to withdraw our child, as this could be a great facility with more investment in lower ratios, more consistency of staff, and better teacher training in preschool curriculum.
Not impressed with the staff. Very unprofessional at times and not sure working with kids is what they should be doing. Lots of staff turnover.
This school is EXCELLENT!!! Brand new,nice and clean. Teachers all have at least a BS/BA degrees. Owner is very nice and his own child attends there as well. Very secure and lots of room, very low to teacher ratio. Teachers seem to enjoy their job and are very nice. My kid has bee here almost 2 years. They had my kid potty trained in 2 weeks! Great place!