PARENTS BEWARE!…read more If I could give negative stars I would, and it is extremely unfortunate that this is the case as there are precious few places where children in the Okanagan can have a Montessori education. To be fair, at one time, they had a couple stellar humans in their employ and when we first started there we honestly felt quite highly about the place, but those few good ones have moved on and everything has gone downhill. The remaining staff are completely untrained in any sort of de-escalation tactics for little ones, which as daycare and preschool caregivers they should be well versed in. They cannot handle any sort of confrontation with children or parents. Staff are unprofessional and severely lacking in basic communication skills and are incredibly disorganized as a result. Their curriculum is also completely under stimulating for children who actually want to learn. The staffing changes and subsequent changes to how classrooms are organized, resulted in an immediate shift in our child's behaviour. we went from "I love my school" to "none of my teachers like me and I'm not special" almost overnight. In our attempts to open up better lines of communication with the teachers and get to the bottom of where this was coming from we were given conflicting information about what the expectations were (one teacher told us that the expectation was that our child would lay quietly on a mat for an entire hour without any activities while other children napped, and that if we wanted activities provided during that hour we should send them from home, only to be scolded by another teacher the following day for sending activities from home and that they provide activities after 10 or 15 minutes) and conflicting information about what was going on in the classroom in general. As another means of addressing our concerns, we requested a meeting with the manager. This request was ignored for 2 months (we requested a meeting in mid-March and did not receive one until the beginning of May when things had gotten significantly worse. During this time, we continued to receive conflicting information. After 2 months of trying, we finally got a meeting with the manager and the teacher during which we discussed at great length our concerns around communication and together worked on a plan as to how to address the lack of communication and the behaviour that the teachers were clearly unable to handle - behaviour included running around the classroom and requesting alone time sitting in the hall when overwhelmed. In our discussion, we all agreed that the problem here was our child was bored, and not content to just sit and colour pictures for 8 hours a day, that she needed to be challenged and made to feel helpful so we left the meeting with an action plan, which included some follow up with our child at home as well as some actions that the team there would take such as a classroom switch so that our child would have better stimulation and different support. The action plan was never implemented, instead we received a very unprofessional letter (partially typed, partially hand written) advising us that we were being given 2 weeks for our child to show improved behaviour. There were no performance objectives as to what they were looking for or how we were measuring this, no opportunity for questions or anyone to direct questions to. The manager then proceeded to actively avoid us (both my husband and myself literally saw her run away when she saw us coming, and I wish that was an exaggeration) for an entire week while none of the commitments we had discussed during our long overdue meeting were put into action by the staff or the manager there and we continued to get no communication or conflicting communication if any at all. We have been asked to pick our child up early without any explanation, or for things as simple as running around the yard during their outside play. It appears they are at this point looking for any excuse to just be rid of us. We were given a note "if you choose to terminate care we won't hold you to a 1 month notice". Overall, I find it nothing short of disgusting that they are even in operation. We recognize that our 4 year old is not perfect, but as parents, it is our job to stand up for her when she is not the one entirely at fault. I highly recommend parents who are seeking quality care and education look elsewhere because it does not exist here!!

OMESS, situated amongst the lovely orchards of east Kelowna boasts low Teacher to student ratios…read morewhile applying the philosophy and teachings of Dr.Maria Montessori. Children meet their individual needs in the areas of academics, cultural exploration and nature through teacher guided lessons with hands-on materials. The prepared environment facilitates each child to become confident, self directed, independent and responsible world citizens. Please call today to book a tour to view our preschool or K-6 classrooms.