I would give them 0 stars if that was an option! This is the worst possible environment to begin your child's education.
To give you a little background about us. My husband and I are both engineers and we both emigrated from India more than 15 years ago and are settled in US. We don't have any family in Michigan and are both working professionals in high stress jobs.
Our only son started at Bloomfield Maples Montessori in January and was out of there by end of May. In March, the school scheduled a parent-teacher conference and told us that our son is having behavioral issues (totally laughable because they consider my son, who is a toddler, walking away from another toddler when he took his toy, a behavioral issue - I guess they would have a problem with Gandhi too for being a pacifist. I think it is great that my toddler has the common sense to walk away from a potentially dangerous situation of fighting another toddler over a toy). They also made a suggestion that we take our son to speech therapy but offered no data or evidence (they sent blank notes home everyday)and basically hid behind vague statements like "I cant put my finger on what the problem is" and "I am not an expert so I cant say". Well, are working parents of an only child and we expect the teacher to be more of an expert than us and be able to pin point what the issue is before we take him to expensive, time consuming and unnecessary (I say activities like speech therapy.
My husband and I talked about it and decided that a healthy (his pediatrician didn't find any issues with his speech) 2.5 year old doesn't need speech therapy and that he will be fine in a few months, as studies indicate that boys (especially first born and multi-lingual) don't really start their speech until 3 years old, When we didn't take him to speech therapy, the teacher pulled me aside and told me that they will expel him out of school for non-compliance. REALLY EXPEL HIM! We were completely blindsided as we were never told that this was a requirement for re-enrollment, as they already accepted our re-enrollment fee. I was asking for meeting minutes from our parent teacher conference which they sent almost 6 weeks later. GUESS WHAT! Those meeting minutes were so poorly written they had multiple typos including both the words in "Speech Therapy" (spelled as "speach thearpy"). Other typos include the words "motor" (spelled as "moter") and "opinion" (spelled as "oppinion"). This is the quality of their teachers. I wish there was a way to post the picture of that note here on yelp. I graded it with red pen and gave them an "F" and returned a color copy of it to them so they know exactly how I feel about their sub-standard teachers. I was so livid that I told them that all their teachers need to get "spelling therapy" and if they were to kick a kid out for non-compliance of something, at least get that something spelled correctly. I do agree with them on one thing - that school is not for my son.
In conclusion, the school believes in their hypocrisy of "we'll kick your child out for poor performance, even though we are poor performers ourselves"! They are quick to get paid and are definitely don't tell you they are sub-par when they position themselves during admissions. In addition to the above, there were multiple documented instances of neglect during the time that leads to me to believe that they categorically discriminated against my son.
I thought about not writing anything on yelp for a couple of months now, but for some reason, I always come back to my philosophy that "if parents are bad, only their children will be affected. However, if teachers (or schools) are bad, it would affect generations of children". I could not bring myself to walk away from this without taking action that informs future parents. If you have standards for education for your children, just avoid them completely. read more
