Creative Minds Learning Centers - Happy Valley

They care more about the teacher/child ratios than what's going on with the children.

I'll start out by saying that many of the teachers at this school are great, I mean really great. They obviously care about their job and try to make school a fun and educational place for the children. Having a theme each month with a lot of art projects and activities around it is really great. Many teachers go above and beyond, spending their own money to supplement supplies for their class. The school promoted activities like gardening and cooking classes in their curriculum, though we never saw either of those happen. The food provided is healthier than you'll find at most any other daycare center, although it is not quite as 'organic, local and clean' as they lead you to believe. Not a huge deal for us, but it gives the perception of false advertising.

The main issue we had, and the reason we ended up taking our children elsewhere, is the management. These schools share Directors, so there's usually one Assistant Director there (though she can't be there 7-6 every day) but we hardly ever saw the Director. Both of them are nice enough people, but they don't go out of their way to be friendly or welcoming when they see you or your children. Staff turnover was average but the teachers were often stressed out about coverage/ratios and we got the sense the children were shuffled around to different classrooms to meet maximum ratios more than we were comfortable with. The woman that oversees all of the schools didn't seem much better. Maybe it's because two of them don't have children of their own, but they had little sense of what could make their school better for parents and kids. The play area for younger children is a prime example of this - there's not much for them to do, all of the wood gives many slivers and not to mention all of the sharp edges with wobbly toddlers running around. Adding variety and bringing in more guests and activities for the kids would be great as well. They find a reason to close one day a month (whether it's a holiday, in-service day, etc) and then they close from Christmas through New Years, but are happy to charge full tuition price for the month of December. Most months have a special day where parents are invited to join an activity, but it's at 3pm in the afternoon and if you have more than one child there you have to pick which class to attend because they rarely stagger the times. Overall, we felt that it was not a working-parent friendly run business, even though that's who their main customer is.