October 2023 by Tyler Nesvik
Quick summary: With any review, please check posting date as things can always change. Great teachers, terrible manager who is a MAJOR reason this place struggles. I would give 0 stars, but the teachers are actually good with some exceptions and that is who the children are interacting with. The board needs to do a better job to take action on management and the incidents listed below. Parents cannot speak out because they will be kicked out leaving them without childcare. Since I will never return, I have happy to share.Full Story: My child attended CCDC for almost two years. We were not from Macon and this was the only center available for us as we worked in Columbia and Kirksville. We didn't know any in home daycares at the time, otherwise we would have pulled our child immediately. The current manager of the facility is lazy, unorganized, disrespectful, and just isn't cut out to be in management. MANY great teachers have left the facility specifically because of the terrible management.Incident 1: Dropping my daughter off one morning there was a small fire in the kitchen. It was taken care of and no one was hurt. I showed up to kids exciting and alarms going off. I was very impressed by the teachers taking action to stay calm and safely remove kids. It was 50 degrees outside so teachers did everything they could to keep infants to older children warm. Here is the issue. I was there for over an hour. Do you think the manager ever showed up? NO. She should have been there immediately. I verified she wasn't sick and she didn't have an appointment. She just didn't show.Incident 2: Typical for all daycares, but charged full rate to maintain a spot before my child arrived. I had to start paying in Nov even though I wouldn't need care until Feb. When asked if other children were starting in Nov, Dec, and Jan, the manager told me children were starting all of those months hence why I had to pay. Guess what, no one started in those months and another new child didn't show until March. Pretty easy to see her bluff on that one. Then when going from the infant room to the 1 to 2 year old room, the manager tried to bump my child 1 month early. I don't qualify for free daycare paying early costed me $1860.Incident 3: We received a message from CCDC saying there was a very damaging Facebook post that they were dealing with. No other information was provided and no official communication on what occurred was shared. Neither I nor my child were involved, but people from out of town should be informed. The fact is, this daycare struggles to keep teachers employed. Probably because teachers are over worked and often times have to skip breaks due to others calling in. However, when a teacher does something that violates their contract, they should be reprimanded or terminated. This is not the case at this daycare. This exact thing happened at CCDC and the two teachers who tried to do the right thing were terminated, and the offender was able to keep their job. Once we learned what the offense was, we knew of an in home we could get into. We pulled our child immediately even though we were leaving Macon in 3 weeks. The offender may have been affected by now so please check the posting date.
