Little Stars Pre-School

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169 14th St
Oakland, CA 94612

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(510) 286-9800
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Disclaimer: my son went there four or five years ago. It's possible that they have changed. I would, however, recommend grilling them at length if you even wanted to think about s...

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This preschool is HORRIBLE 6/9/2006

Disclaimer: my son went there four or five years ago. It's possible that they have changed. I would, however, recommend grilling them at length if you even wanted to think about sending a child to this hellhole. Here are a few of the problems we encountered. 1. They did not have a legal teacher-to-child ratio. They bulked it out with staff members who weren't teachers, who weren't supervising the kids - so they could be like "Look! We have two adults in this room of twenty children!" or whatever - while one of the adults was just cleaning up and not paying any attention to the kids and had no training around kids. 2. Because of the crappy teacher-to-child ratio, there was no supervision - sometimes literally. When the kids were out playing, that meant that there was intense and rampant bullying -- even among three-year-olds!! The teachers and staff members would hang out in the shade at the edge of the play area, while the kids were all the way out on the play structure in the middle. 3. By "sometimes literally," I mean that I frequently found children sitting in a corner of the lobby area, with no adults in sight. It turned out that that was one way that they did "time out" - to send preschoolers to sit by themselves at an end of the building that was otherwise totally abandoned. 4. For that matter, when our son first started going there, there was so little supervision that we could drop him off at his classroom, and leave, and he could run back out to the lobby all alone and cry and cry about being alone, and the teachers wouldn't even notice that he had been dropped off, much less that he had disappeared. And they treated this situation like he was acting out, and related it to us as if we and our son had done something wrong. 5. The bullying and lack of supervision created a vicious cycle where kids would beat up our son (in preschool!) who wouldn't fight back because we had told him not to hit, and who would go to the teachers for help, and then the teachers would say right to his face that since they hadn't seen what happened they didn't know who to believe, and would put him and the other child in time out. 6. If our son tried to escape from time out, the teachers would GRAB HIM BY THE EAR and PULL him back into time out. When we found this out, we took him out of the school immediately. 7. Before we found out about the ear-pulling, he had already told us that the head teacher, Ms. Lee, yelled at them and hit their arms. When I talked to her about this, she lied to my face, and said things that were obviously beating around the bush like "We're not allowed to hit kids because it's against the law. The only time we would ever use a physical intervention with a child...." Now, come on. And also, "the only time" they would do that, according to her, was if that was "the only thing that child would listen to." And the example she gave was if a kid took another kid's toy. Yeah, that's worthy of smacking them. That's seriously abusive thinking - that there's ever a child who won't listen to anything but violence. Funny, the next preschool he went to (Growing Light Montessori) never seemed to have that problem with kids. Maybe that's because they cared enough to pay attention to the children. 8. Besides the physical bullying by teachers and children, our son was also made fun of for "liking girl things." Whether it was a light blue Tweety Bird shirt or a pink PowerPuff Girls backpack, he would be followed around and teased and mocked by the kids there. I didn't know about this until I saw it happen; it turned out that the head teacher totally knew about it, and wasn't doing anything. When I talked to her about it, she acknowledged it and said that she would take care of it, and waited until a day when all the kids were there and talked to them all about how there's no such thing as a girl color or a boy color, which had zero effect and was too little too late. There are more, like the way they intentionally push the children to read which makes the ones who aren't reading yet feel horrible, the way that they lie and are rude to anyone who they don't know is a family member, the way that they refused to support us in potty-training him - like, we would be potty-training him at home, and then he would go there in underwear and come back in some other child's Pull-Ups because they insisted that he wasn't ready to be potty-trained solely because he wouldn't go to the bathroom on their command... But this should be enough for any parent. more
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Editorial
  • Offering children a large and safe playground, teachers, a nuturing academic environment, songs and dance and kindergarten prep.

  • 5/11/2007 Provided by Citysearch
Additional information
  • Neighborhoods: Civic Center, Downtown Oakland
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