Oakland Garden School

"As a parent a few weeks in, I couldn't be happier. Here's why. My son is having a great time • He is developing a lot of social confidence • He plays outside a lot (comes home dirty and tired and sleeps well during the week so I know he played hard • He constantly lets me know he's having fun I'm having a great time • the teachers are so friendly and laid back when I forget something, or arrive late. I feel at ease overall. I've been email shamed at other places so maybe I'm a bit traumatized. • The window for drop-off is between 730 and 9, which makes it super easy in the morning rush • teachers are happy to answer questions during pickup /drop-off when it's not busy Those are my two most important baselines for giving this review. There are older reviews about turnover, which I was uneasy about. Christina Enerio, the new director of both OGS and Wildwood in Grand Lake, put me at ease with her kind, respectful demeanor. She comes from a much bigger program and seems to be bringing a lot of organization to this one. She also walked me through the context of some of the complaints filed officially, which put me at ease as it's easy to draw conclusions online."

"My child goes here and as to date I'm very satisfied with the experience we are all having."

"***NIGHTMARISH SCHOOL WITH HIGH TEACHER TURNOVER*** My partner and I are educators, so we know how stressful it can be on children to switch schools. However, our experience with the Oakland Garden School was so disturbing that we chose to pull our son out of the school after less than one full school year. If you are considering sending your child there, please do all your research. The sleazy owner of the Oakland Garden School offers parents credits, rewards, and other incentives to write positive Yelp reviews, but please do more research on Berkeley Parents Network and Google. There are dark things happening at this school and it starts from the top down. The owner (her name is Tae Ha) stages tours for parents only on specific days after requiring teachers to do certain things during the tours that are not done regularly. We witnessed this as parents multiple times after enrolling our son. Despite the high cost of tuition, the teachers were paid poverty-line wages, not given health benefits at all, and she demanded that they work long hours. Being educators, we could very clearly tell everyday when we dropped our son off that the teachers were miserable and overworked. It was not a positive place to bring a small child. We witnessed Tae yell at a teacher in front of children and it was very disturbing. We spoke with our son's teachers and even the woman who Tae had hired to manage the school while she was off trying to open a second location. They were very kind, compassionate educators, but their consensus was that Tae was exploiting the entire staff and treating them very poorly. While the school is called "The Oakland Garden School" we saw little-to-no gardening. The outdoor play space is nothing more than half an acre of caked dirt with a few cheaply-built play structures. There is no garden. There are a few fruit trees, but that's it. After six months there, our son did not garden one single time. He did not plant anything. Not once. He did not care for the chickens or goats that are kept in tiny pens and not allowed to roam. There's no gardening whatsoever. When I pressed Tae on this fact after a few months of enrollment, she claimed to be too busy to answer my questions and went into her office and closed the door. Once this picture became clear to us, we pulled our son from the school after not even completing a year there. Several other parents we befriended did the same a few months later when the staff staged a mass exodus and many teachers quit during the school year. We have since met a woman who used to teach there several years earlier and she told us that this is a cycle at the The Oakland Garden School that has been going on for a very long time. Tae hires teachers, she exploits them horrifically, then they quit and there's massive turnover and parents/families flee too. But since it's the Bay Area, there's always more unknowing parents looking for schools and always more unknowing teachers looking for jobs. We can only hope that this review warns any prospective parents. That former teacher summed it up perfectly. She said "OGS is like the Whole Foods of preschools. They have a good façade pretending to be socially-conscious and earth-friendly, but really it's just run by the same exploitive capitalist sleazy people who ruin everything and make everyone miserable.""