Parkside Joyful Kids Academy - Concord

This daycare is great!!
PJA has had a VERY checkered past with multiple directors, teachers and issues over the past 4 years my kids have been there, HOWEVER, since Ms. Karen's arrival, she has been AMAZING and has turned the daycare around a thousand percent!! She has hired on the most amazing, caring and consistent staff to join the veterans that have helped our children blossom over the past couple years and my 3 and 4 year old enjoy going to school every day!

I absolutely love Parkside Joyful Kids! My son goes there. He has been going there for 2 years and his teacher Ms. Pat is so amazing! I am continuously amazed at the consistency she provides. She also really cares about the children in her classroom. Her back to school night was so much fun for the parents. I give this place a huge thumbs up.

My grandson attends PJKA and he enjoys the play but he is enjoying the academics being put in place to prepare him for kindergarten. He is 3 and they have begun the replace playing with academics in the 3-4 class and I think that is awesome. Miss Pat is a vital teacher in making this happen. She and my grandson have connected and just under a month together I can see such a positive improvement in his behavior at home. There is consistency in the classroom, which brings consistency to our home. Thank you Mia Patt and PJKA.

They have had so many staff changes here; I can't count how many directors and teachers my daughter has had in the 2.5 years I've been here. The lasts set is not my favorite but the location makes it really difficult to change daycare. They haven't replaced her favorite teacher and it's making drop off terrible since the current temporary teacher doesn't greet her when she arrives or assist in any way, so I'm constantly late for work.
No outside food is allowed as too many parents were bring in special food since they provide typical cafeteria junk food (spaghetti, pizza, fish stick, etc).
Their playground has gravel, which I'm constantly dumping out of her shoes at home.

I have been putting off writing a review in hopes that their fixes would actually improve things, but somehow they made it worse. The company never stops amazing me at how awful of service they provide. Where to start?

First, their handling of drop-off is horrible. Teachers don't greet my child, and basically ignore her. It is often 5 minutes of trying to get my kid to let go of my leg before the teacher even tries.

The playground is terrible, it has little rocks, which my daughter is often coming home with a ton of rocks in her shoes. Even though they know it is a problem, they don't check shoes of the kids. Seeing as she pays in the morning, I can only imagine the rocks are in there all day long. She even started to hate wearing shoes because of rocks.

They have a high turnover rate, and communicate very little with the parents about how things are changing. I often find my child not wanting to go to school, breaking down, only to find out her teach left a week ago.

Lastly, they had a crazy food policy of absolutely no outside food. So if you have even a little snack for you kid from the car, you must wait with your child to eat that food. You can't bring in cupcakes, or snacks, etc.

That all said, I will say that my child did arrive home safe, which is basically the bare minimum, but at least they were able to do that.

My tipping point for this review was when the director told me that my check-in / check-out wasn't fast enough even though they make no effort to support a quick drop off. Again, really piss-poor service.

Update: This place is such a weird place. More recently the Director, which has a policy that no office personnel are suppose to use the parking, but apparently the director feels she can, making an excuse that she might need to drive the kid off (which she isn't legally allowed to do).

Not only that, there is a constant problem of people parking in the handicapped spot that are not. The place will not correct those people, and instead post up things that are not problems, like no using cell phones. This isn't a problem, no one is messing around with their cell phones during pick up or drop off. So they ignore real problems.

Last point, my kid is still getting rocks in her shoes. The teachers cannot seem to figure out how to check the kid's shoes for rocks, so my daughter could be having rocks in her shoes all day long.