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Comment by scottlamb | Hacker News Reader

Thanks for the updated perspective!

> This changed after covid. My understanding is that they struggled to fill classrooms due to people moving away from MTV / Palo Alto.

Ahh, that explains how my across-the-street neighbor has a kid there.

> Daycare turnover has been bad industry wide, and our classroom had bad turnover in 2021 but it stablized since then. We've super loved our experience. Really great sanitary procedures, high quality learning objectives and measurement, healthy food, etc.

From what this provider told me, the Google daycares' turnover was bad even by industry standards.

Anyway, glad to hear you had a good experience there, and my sympathy as you try to find a replacement!

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FWIW not Google but have my child at a Kiddie Academy, and turnover is abysmal..monthly sounds right. And yeah they do class transfers by age and abrubtly so. And they’re in one room all day, though when it’s over 50 degrees they’ll go outside (I’m in Maryland and ya know..winter).

Edit: oh and $2500/mo for 0-2 yr olds..curious how that stacks up compared to Google day care!

My kids were at a Kiddie Academy for a while that was coincidentally down the street from a Google daycare. It was a pretty good experience at the time. Each room had at least one long time teacher (years). They eased them into the next room. But then management changed, they pushed those teachers out, we reported a couple ratio violations to the state, and we left. We tried to get the owners more involved (Kiddie Academy is a franchise), then we met the owners and thought maybe less involvement would be better...they got a decent director in the end but the damage was already done from our perspective.

Then my kids went to a Montessori style preschool. Small, run by the owner of 20+ years and a couple of long time staff members. That was great for us. The owner has since retired though and the school changed hands. Nothing lasts forever, I guess...

Kiddie Academy struck me as ~3rd/4th tier when I was looking at daycares - it was way down my list.

My kids went to a small local chain where some of the teachers have been with it since it was founded in the 90s, almost 30 years ago. Average tenure was like 10-15 years. Unfortunately they got bought by Bright Horizons last year, and have lost 4 teachers since the school year began (although luckily it's that 4 teachers have rotated into the 2 spots vacated, not that they lost 4 veteran teachers).

Was it The Wonder Years? I saw really mixed reviews on Yelp for that place and am curious if you have some insight into that.

Thanks Scott <3

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