Tenderheart Preschool and Childcare

TL; DR: Please do not send your child to Tenderheart. Angie is harsh on the kids, uses inappropriate discipline, and needs to retire from childcare. Please read the complaints on the early learning website, and save yourself the consequences of Angie’s lack of care and concern for the children.
My son attended Tenderheart from the time he was 4 months old until he was 3.5. We started on the daycare side, with Jessie, enrolling our son in August of 2020. Jessie is not a warm person, and any questions you ask will be met with quite a bit of defensiveness, but I just wrote it off as her personality because our son seemed happy there, and we decided to stay for preschool.
We moved over to the preschool, run by Angie (Jessie’s mom) in September 2023. At preschool, the kids spend one day a week with Angie, and the rest of the week with Ashley. While we initially got positive reports and it seemed like things were going well, out of the blue in October we got a note from Angie on a day she was with the kids asking if we’d had our son evaluated for Oppositional Defiance Disorder. Given that this was the first time we’d ever heard concerns, we asked questions, and Angie proceeded to describe behaviors that were pretty typical of a three-year-old, including challenges listening, reluctance to try new things, easily distracted, etc. However, we took the complaint seriously, having our son evaluated by two different specialists. Notably, Angie would not allow him to be evaluated on a day where she was in charge of him, despite her reporting the most significant issues, which suggested to me she didn’t want her interactions with the children evaluated. Both providers stated that his behavior was typical for his age, and were appalled that a provider would suggest a diagnosis for a child, especially one so extreme. While Ashley rarely reported issues with him, on days he was with Angie our son complained that he was always in “time out” and that Angie was always unkind to him.
Long story short, we had a few calmer months after the evaluations came back and thought things were going better. In March 2024, my MIL was picking up our son and arrived to him crying hysterically. Angie opened the door and reported that our son wasn’t listening, so she put her hand over his mouth to get him to be quiet. He started crying, saying she hit him. What struck my MIL the most was how cold Angie was about it, and how she made no move to comfort him, instead speaking to him in a harsh tone and trying to get him to put his raingear away despite being visibly upset. We met with Angie and told her we weren’t comfortable with that way of getting him to listen, and she got defensive. We started looking for other schools. The following Monday, my son told me that Angie hits the kids on the head, and when I asked him to show me, he slapped me on the side of my head. I was concerned, and told him we’d figure it out. The next morning at drop off, he asked Angie why she is unkind. She stated she wasn’t, then called him a liar and said he couldn’t come in with that attitude. I was standing right there, startled by how quickly a minor remark from a child escalated. I told her we didn’t need to come in at all and took our son home. She terminated us from care later that day. My son was not given the chance to say goodbye to Ashley or to friends, and was so confused about what happened.
After interviewing other facilities, I realized how significant the problems at Tenderheart are, particularly the approach to discipline, not allowing parents into the facility at all and not treating parents like part of a care team. I have subsequently discovered several concerning reports of inappropriate discipline and poor care on the state website, which make me think my son’s complaints about Angie’s treatment of him are accurate, and describe a pattern of behavior that make her unfit for childcare. Please do yourself a favor, and don’t send your kid here.