Tierra Encantada Seward

On paper, Tierra Encantada has a highly attractive business model – cloth diapers, organic food, Spanish immersion, to name a few. Unfortunately, the quality of care that this chain daycare offers does not live up to what they advertise to interested parents. I had my daughter enrolled in Tierra Encantada Seward for almost exactly one year. During that time, she had at least 7 different teachers in her infant classroom due to high teacher turnover. We would frequently drop our daughter off in a room that was chaotic and above the state-mandated teacher-child ratio of 4:1. This high teacher turnover highlights the company’s inability to adequately maintain and train staff at their centers, despite their advertised high pay and large suite of benefits offered to staff.

All that said, the primary reason for our decision to withdraw our daughter from Tierra Encantada was due to the HQ staff’s inability to acknowledge parental concerns and to communicate with parents with any level of respect. When concerns about teacher-child ratios were raised to headquarter staff, the CEO herself responded to parents with “I also think it is important to stop exaggerating what is happening in the center…these sorts of wild, crazy rumors and gossip are getting out of control.” While HQ administration accused parents of spreading “wild and crazy rumors” when raising concerns about the Seward center being out of state-mandated ratios, the Minnesota Depart of Human Services had a different conclusion. In May 2021, Tierra Encantada Seward was cited with three violations (https://licensinglookup.dhs.state.mn.us/Details.aspx?l=1099497) – two of which were for being out of ratio. From a quick look at the DHS site, it appears these sorts of citations are not new for Tierra at its HQ locations (Eagan, Bryant, Windom, Seward and Hiawatha). The Eagan center was cited for serving meals that do not comply with USDA requirements in December 2020 (https://licensinglookup.dhs.state.mn.us/Details.aspx?l=1065444) and the Windom location was cited for poor supervision of children in July 2020 (https://licensinglookup.dhs.state.mn.us/Details.aspx?l=1093613). If you are a parent of a child at Tierra Encantada, expect headquarter administration to sweep any concern that you raise about the care of your child under the rug even when the concern is valid and verifiable.

In addition, the HQ staff appear to make impulse decisions about how to operate their centers rather than ones that are based on facts. For example, on May 20, HQ staff announced that they were lifting all forms of mask mandates across all centers on June 1 because “a majority of parents also shared they thought the mask mandate should be ended when the governor's mandate was lifted.” In my opinion, no childcare organization should be making a decision that affects the health and wellbeing of vulnerable infant populations based on a parental survey. Three days later Tierra Encantada was forced to backtrack their decision because it was not in compliance with state mandates – they now have mask requirements in effect until July 1. The fact that Tierra Encantada made such a hasty decision to remove mask mandates in the first place speaks to a lack of data-driven decision making by leaders of the company that do not put our children’s health as the top priority. The above examples are just two of many off-putting communications that were had between families and Tierra Encantada HQ.

Before enrolling at Tierra Encantada, I recommend that any interested family schedule tours of other daycare centers. My partner and I were astounded to see how calm and organized our new daycare center is operated. The center director is always in her office and available to talk to parents – which was never true at Tierra Encantada Seward because the center director almost exclusively filled in as a teacher in classrooms that were short-staffed. Because our new center is well-staffed with happy teachers, the staff are able to lead children in age-appropriate development and sensory activities. By the end of our time at Tierra Encantada Seward, we felt as if we were paying for supervised play for our daughter with no sort of implemented curriculum. Finally, ask any competing daycare center how fully they enroll their different classrooms. Tierra Encantada enrolls classrooms with as many students as legally possible, despite the detrimental effect it may have on a teacher’s ability to teach the kids. For example, pre-k rooms at Tierra Encantada almost exclusively have 20 kids in the classroom – the maximum allowed by the state. At our new center, all classrooms are capped at 15 to ensure that curriculum can be effectively administered. All to say, I did not know how great and not stressful a daycare could be until I withdrew my daughter from Tierra Encantada and enrolled her at another center.