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June 2024 by Ashita Saluja
If you’re here because you checked out Berkeley Parents network, those reviews are really old! Me & 3 other local families I know well have their kids attending Oakland Garden School and all of us have loved it. The new Director came in around 2021 and used to run a massive corporate onsite crèche prior to this. What we experienced was night & day compared to what I’m reading on pre 2021 reviews. She really knows her stuff, is super hands on, knows all the kids and parents by name, is a parent herself and is the anchor of the place. The teachers love her, which says a lot about how happy they are with her style, the professional development opportunities and honestly it’s the biggest thing that will translate into how much they will show up day to day for kids like mine. I plan to skip TK and keep my kid there because it’s a lovely place for my fairly reserved kid. And most importantly for 2 parent 9-5 households like mine, only one week of holiday is “camp free.” Preschools often follow OUSD calendars and are all over the place with camp availability. No matter where you end up please check for this! Also it’s a very very outdoor focused school my kid comes back dirty, tired, tanned and happy which I love.
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January 2023 by Kris Wong
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 funI'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 busyThose 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.
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September 2022 by Fletcher F.
TL/DR: Our kids were at OGS for 2+ years and we generally recommend OGS and really enjoyed our experience of the school.First, it should be said that we started at a different school pre-covid and looked exhaustively in the area for a good school during covid for our 2 rambunctious boys. We did not simply take the school that was most convenient for us, and truthfully we drove some distance each day to the school.We picked OGS for its huge yard and highly creative and play-based environment and were not disappointed. The kids came home exhausted and happy every day and picking them up from school felt like arriving at the best toddler hangout sesh in Oakland each day (which never failed to put a smile on my face). Other schools we had experienced were more uptight on the one hand or entirely unstructured on the other, and OGS rides the fine line of having constant activities while also letting kids enjoy being kids.It has to be said that the Reggio Emilia style arts and crafts and hands-on activities are top notch, and the owner does a great job at supplying materials and rotating activities so kids are always stimulated.Teacher turnover was the biggest problem and most frequent complaint I heard, but spoiler, it's still a problem at the more expensive preschool we're at with our youngest now. We lived through some of the issues described in the other reviews - that the teachers were allegedly not paid well or not treated entirely appropriately. I support our kids' teachers as much as any other parent, but all I can say is that our personal experience was good - the old director was excellent, the new director is excellent, and all of the teachers over the time we were there ranged from good to great.My sense is that the new director has addressed many of the issues that were raised, including stricter safety measures and ongoing professional development for teachers to help with retention. What I can say for sure is that our personal experience at the school was generally positive. For a reasonably priced and accommodating preschool, I think OGS is a very good option.
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September 2022 by Kassie R.
My kid has been here for 6 months and she loves it. The new director has addressed concerns flagged in previous yelp posts and we love the teachers. Highly recommend this place.
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April 2022 by Elizabeth W.
Upon the departure of the director who was in place when I wrote this previous review, Oakland Garden School took a downward turn and we had to remove our child for fear of his safety. There were instances of unnecessary physical interaction between teachers and students, students found outside of the school with no supervision and they were cited for out of proportion ratios. The administration struggles to take accountability for the actions of their teachers and I feel I was at times lied to. If you are considering sending your child here, I highly suggest you find another preschool.
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January 2022 by Daniel A.
OGS is a school with amazing potential that is rotten at the core. The facility is really great. The garden and yard are fantastic. Being outside many hours a day is awesome. The classrooms are beautiful and full of great stuff. There are *some* great teachers, but... at the core of any school is the owner, and the owner of OGS is just a terrible preschool owner. She cannot retain good teachers. She treats her employees horribly. Teacher turnover at OGS is shocking. If you poke around on the internet you'll discover that OGS is actually legendary for teacher turnover. In the year we were there, one of the classrooms had 100% turnover, twice! Just before we left, another classroom had 100% turnover in the space of a month. There were numerous other cases of teachers leaving midyear, sometimes shortly after being hired. Why does this happen? I got to know some of the teachers, as well as the director, really well while our daughter was there. The number one problem is that teachers are paid inequitably, so inexperienced, less trained teachers are often paid more than those with more experience and training, and they all know it, and they HATE it. I spoke directly with multiple teachers who left OGS, and they all complained about the arbitrary and inequitable pay scale. She also chisels them on sick days and sends them home early, without pay, when attendance is low. The other major problem is that the owner micromanages and denigrates her employees. She rearranges their classrooms after hours without consulting them, which preschool teachers hate. She criticizes them bitterly, *in the classroom*, *in front of the kids.* Teachers HATE it. At pick up teachers frequently told me that they were hanging on by a thread, just trying to get through the school year so they didn't hurt the kids by leaving mid-year. And then, boom, they'd be gone. So, what do you get? Your kids loses the connection and continuity they need, and, not surprisingly, a lot of teachers stay away from OGS, so you wind up with a mix of some very good-hearted, and in some cases quite good teachers, and others who really make you wish you had taken your kid somewhere else. Some families have a great experience, but we knew many families who just wished they could get a spot somewhere else. We were lucky and got a spot somewhere else. If you take the tour, just remember, what you see is not what you get. If you ask about any of this stuff, the current director, who is very protective of the owner, will tell you that parents like me are just angry and trying to undermine the school. Do yourself a really big favor: trust me that this is not the case. I wanted so hard for OGS to be what it could have been. I loved some of the teachers, and all of other parents. But the owner just can't get out of her own way, and basically keeps the school from being what it could be.
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December 2018 by Jupiter
My child goes here and as to date I'm very satisfied with the experience we are all having.
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December 2017 by Walden Alexander
***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."
