Creative Kids Academy

Love! Love! Love! Can’t say enough about the staff! Both my sons went there and they had a wonderful experience. They both left having phonemic awareness and starting to read! The curriculum is perfect for the ages. Being a teacher, I 100% would recommend CKA!

Our experience with Creative Kids Academy has been below average for what we expected after speaking to the director. The director is also the owner of this center and she made sure in her welcome of presenting this center as more than a daycare but more of a school setting with certified teachers and a curriculum. However, after having our child here for over 2 years, this is more of a daycare than a school. If you’re looking for a place to drop your child off to just run around and do coloring and crafts then this will be for you.
Specifically, these are our main issues of concern for you to bear in mind if you are considering this daycare. If you require that director be honest and forthcoming in the assessment of your child then this is not the place for you or your child. For an entire year we only received «good news» about our child. We asked the staff and the director on several occasions (including parent teacher night, later we were told that parent teacher night is not the time to ask questions!) about our child’s development and we were never told anything other than the good things. That is why we were caught off guard when the Director and teacher wrote us a note stating that they were having concerns about the emotional and communicative development of our child. We sat through a meeting with the director and she emphasized that this behavior had been occurring for over 6 months. The director became defensive when asked why no one ever notified us about the trouble with communication and emotional outbursts our child was having. She stated that it was CKA’s policy to evaluate the child (even after an entire year) and therefore did not see a strong concern to notify us. We feel time was wasted and a better approach could have been taken in concern to our child’s needs.
It is our belief that a daycare institution should present an honest assessment and always have an open dialogue with the parents. We were seldom given a daily breakdown of our child’s routine. We asked for pointers when we were potty training our child and we were only told that they would apply whatever we were doing at home. That’s not exactly sound advice we would expect from an institution that has been involved in early childhood development for over 20 years. It seems to me that CKA is the default institution for a lot of parents in the area. Many of the parents have siblings and cousins attending. To an outsider it looks like many parents are settling and are expected to place their children there.
I would say that the school is relatively clean and safe for children. However, be aware that there are tons of mosquitos in the yard and our child came home with multiple bites on the face, arms and legs. I am also concerned with the summer camp where the ratio is obviously just meeting the state standards. The aides are nice and some of them actually stand as being the most helpful yet I can’t help but notice that it seems that many of the aides are barely out of High school and the director does not provide them with much training. This was evident when our child fell and cut his elbow badly on the sidewalk of the parking lot (where they have water play in the summer, with no fence, just some orange cones. The playground though is fenced). There was no band aid on the elbow and the scab was starting to yellow, when I asked why they hadn’t at least put a Band-​Aid on it the inexperienced staff said it was because he did not want it. My child is under the age of 5, the adults should know to put a Band-​Aid on a very bad cut.
In closing, knowing what we do now, we cannot in good faith recommend this daycare. Please look elsewhere. We have placed our child in another daycare where we get forms returned to us daily telling us his day and any concerns. He is provided a nutritious breakfast, lunch and snack. Also the ratio of children to certified teachers and certified aides is 5:1 in the 3 – 4 year old class. We now see what an effective daycare can have on the development of a child.