The Merit School of Arlington

The program may actually be great but I couldn’t tell you since they’ve “lost,” on 2 separate occasions, documentation of us signing my daughter up on the waitlist. To add insult to injury, they put us at the bottom of the list each time. We’ve given up and moved on elsewhere.

As a new mom, I was of course nervous about finding care upon returning to work. So far this place looks and feels great. It's clean, inviting, diverse, and nurturing. The teachers in and out of LO's assigned room take a genuine interest in LO's health and safety. LO has an assigned color. All of his bottles, food, diapers, wipes, etc. are marked accordingly. The teachers work with us to help develop milestones, provide lesson plans, and send updates on food, bottles, naps and photos in real time via an app. They also send weekly center email updates and seem receptive to parent feedback. I'm thrilled we got into this infant program and hope our positive experience with this daycare continues.

I had my child enrolled for 2 days In Nov 2016, and we left due to all the awful things going on in his classroom. They may or may not have been happening in other rooms, I can only speak to my experience in the toddler room, it was a nightmare. We toured the facility over a year ago and loved it and what we were seeing. We toured it again before accepting a spot since directors had changed. I felt uneasy about it touring it again noticing what seemed to be a bit of a decline from our last visit, but brushed it off as the pains of change and leaving a daycare we really liked. We loved our current daycare it was just not close to home. We were switching for more proximity to our home and for what was supposed to be better learning opportunity for our child. Arlington also has lower ratios than the state requires, so that was also a plus for us. In general these are the undesirable things I saw in my child's room in 2 days: - another child drank my breast milk and it went unnoticed by staff until I pointed it out - no kid cups were labeled with their names (only mine since I did it myself) - my child and I were sprayed with cleaning solution by staff while we were sitting at the table to finish snack - frequent hitting and no action taken by staff, not even to say don't do it. It was ignored, or worse, such a lack of supervision that they didn't even notice - staff frequently sitting around and not interacting with kids - mealtimes were chaotic with kids pushing and hitting to steal others cups and food, were not being corrected by staff - dirty and unlocked refrigerator in room - lack of organization in general - lack of communication to parents - Video surveillance in each room is a facade there, they are only able to watch it live. So when there is an incident, there is no way to go back and look at it *the problem was so bad the district manager had to get involved and I spoke to them on our last day when I came to pick up all his stuff. District manager even said they had no ground to stand on to even ask for us to give them another chance, that our experience was horrible and not representative of how their facilities typically run. **None of the staff could remember who was drinking from my child's cup, which had breast milk in it and asked me several times if I knew which one had. They are legally responsible for notifying the parent or all the parents in that room if they don't know which kid it was. I'm pretty sure that didn't happen. ***Director seemed to imply the 3 staff members would no longer work there after this. I have doubts that they were actually fired despite their gross negligence and complete lack of ability to do their jobs.