My family recently moved to Metuchen and since my nephews were already going to LGA (in addition to the deceiving google reviews), we decided to send our 20 months old daughter to LGA. She attended LGA for barely two weeks and we had to take her out.
Quality for money paid:
We have experience with Kiddie Academy-Secaucus, TLE-Edison, and LGA-Metuchen. All of these charge more or less in the range of USD 1200 per month. However, the quality of the setup of Kiddie Academy and TLE are far better than LGA. TLE and Kiddie exist in commercial, well designed open-space buildings. LGA exists on the ground floor of a big house with tiny nested-clustered-rooms. LGA is not that clean either of bacteria and viruses as our daughter came back sick very often.
The staffs at Kiddie and TLE undergo regular training, put effort in teaching kids, and create very strong bonds with them. My daughter still remembers Diana from Kiddie @ Secaucus.
Education:
More alarming is how the staff behaves around the kids. Little ones catch the words and context pretty fast. We decided to take her immediately out since she said "oh shit" at one occasion and the "f*" word at another occasion. During her short stay at LGA, she also became quarrelsome.
As many times we went to the day care late in the day or early to pick her up, all the kids were watching youtube.com. I believe education is interacting with the kids and showing them shapes, colors, numbers, alphabets, voices and a lot more. Unprotected/unsupervised content is the last thing they should watch.
My daughter would cry and wouldn't want to go to LGA, while she drags us out to go to TLE every day now.
Staff:
Firstly - they are heavily understaffed.
Secondly - your kids health and behavior is the last thing they care. We complained about our daughter's behavior change and her not getting along so well at LGA and requested a move in the very first month. We were told that the notice period is 1 month so we had to pay around USD 1100 more before moving out. I am not blaming them for picking up the contract and showing us the way to court, but as we were trying to come up with an agreement with the staff, they threatened us with court case.
LGA made us think of our choice of baby-care in current time as well as in future. Their location is very convenient since me and my wife both go to Manhattan for work. However, an irritated child, who always wants to watch TV, slaps kids and tries snatching things from them, gets angry at the family more often is not what we will ever trade for convenience. read more