Swift Child Care Early Childhood Center 8106 Lincoln Avenue, Skokie, IL 60077

"This is primarily a review for anyone with high-energy kids that is considering Swift as an option for childcare. Our child was with Swift from years four through five. This is our second child. Our experience with Swift is by far the most frustrating to date. Our child is handful and we are very aware of this. However, Swift is run like a factory and kids that don’t readily conform to their system are pushed to the side. We strongly believe that the primary objective of the administration is ease of care for their staff, not working with kids along the fringe develop the appropriate social and emotional learning skills that are important at these ages. It is also important for me to preface this by saying that *most* of the teachers at Swift are amazing people with a lot of love in the hearts. Our first concerns arose when we realized that our son was in a classroom with kids ranging from early three to five years old. These are remarkably different developmental age groups. As our son grew out of his nap during age four, he was still required to sit on his cot for up to two hours in silence. Some teachers were upset that he wouldn’t nap on their command. The administration has no back-up plans for kids that no longer nap other than confinement to their cots. Kids may be offered an activity, but they must remain stationary for this whole time. This created daily conflict with our son. The conflict often escalated because of the limited number of options that he was given to pass the time. Their next solution was to make our son eat lunch by himself and then put him down for a nap earlier than the rest of the kids so that he wasn’t a distraction to the others. As a child that has trouble sitting still, nap time became the beginning of our troubles. Over time our son started to resent going to daycare. His teacher no longer greeted our son or us in the morning. Several times she greeted a classmate directly in front of us and then turned around without greeting our son. Evening debriefs were often very short and used to highlight all the problematic behaviors observed that day. Several classroom conflicts escalated simply because our son wanted his teacher’s attention and she refused. Simple acts like wanting to sit next to the teacher during an activity were turned down, further escalating the conflict between our son and his teacher. We brought up our concerns to the administration several times, but these were dismissed without action. We tried a positive reward system where our son would be given a Pokemon card for being well behaved. We found the pack unopened in the bottom of his backpack days later. We were told that the teachers had limited time to talk with students individually, again dismissing the importance of social-emotional learning or conflict resolution. We asked to switch classes multiple times, but were told that this would be too disruptive to other classes. However, the day after a terse discussion with the director space miraculously became open in another room. Things escalated to the point where we needed a child psychologist/social worker observe our son. This led to our son being enrolled in a part-time early intervention program to address his behavior. The day I am writing this review we got an email from early intervention explaining that they haven’t seen any of the problematic behaviors in their classroom. Although our son is not an easy child, it seems that there are known strategies among child care professionals that could be used to help him cope. Despite the noticeable price of this daycare, Swift’s administration has no desire or insufficiently trains their teachers to deal with difficult children. After months of frustration, the director asked for our son’s IEP. Unfortunately, this simply feels like an empty gesture at this point. After the relationship that has been built with Swift we were concerned that it would be misconstrued. I could go on, but the character limit prevents it. In summary, I cannot recommend Swift to families with children like ours."

"Teachers are amazing"

"The ladies in here are always nice and helpful for my kids needs."

"Great facility my granddaughter loves it."

"Swift Child Care is great, especially their infant program on Lincoln Ave. My daughter loves being there and learns so much every day. Teacher's are great. Her infant room teachers, especially Ms. Mariya, are World Class teachers and care about all the children!"