The Sandbox

We had our son at the Sandbox for 3 years. Our experience there was positive. We had been through a few daycare centers before the Sandbox, and I have to say for the money it was good care, and the staff seemed to really care about the kids. We had some previous nightmare experiences at other day care centers, so we were happy to find them.

Yikes — Be VERY CAREFUL sending your child here.
Sandbox/​Sandbox² is a privately-​owned daycare. As such, they have a fair amount of latitude when it comes to choosing which children are enrolled. Admirably, they accept children with special needs, including children with emotional/​behavioral problems. However, the problem is, they don’t provide the necessary direct 1:1 supervision that these special-​needs children need; the result is an alarmingly unsafe environment for the other children there.
My wife and I enrolled our (normal) three-​year-​old son there, only to discover later that he shared a class with two special-​needs children, one with violence/​agression issues. The staff there had mentioned that the child with violence issues (and apparently his mother) were both in counseling.
Concerned, my wife and I both took turns observing the classroom and playground environment on different days, and found that the level of supervision given to this special-​needs child was alarmingly low. Rather than be directly supervised 1-​on-​1 by an adult, this child was allowed to openly agressive, acting out against the other children at random, to the point of physically harming them. At one point, within the span of two minutes, my wife observed this child trying to shake another child out of swing, hitting another child with a tree branch, and picking up a half-​broken brick and throwing it at another child.
There’s actually more along the same lines we observed from the second poorly-​supervised special-​needs child, but, I figure for the sake of this Unilocal review that the above story alone illustrates the point we’re trying to make – their management/staff’s heart is in the right place, but in practice, the lack of supervision given to such children puts the other normal children at risk, and does a disservice to the special-​needs kids themselves who would benefit from the guidance such 1:1 supervision provides.
Sadly, children who come from physically abusive homes are often subject to other forms of abuse. The lack of proper 1:1 supervision of such children in the classroom means every other child in that classroom will be potentially subject to the inappropriate behaviors and acting-​out of that child.
No environment is perfectly safe, and children shouldn’t be constrained by overprotective parents who want to keep them in bubbe-​wrap, but you get the point. This is an accident waiting to happen, particularly in an environment like Sandbox where the children are allowed to do things like go into bathroom areas out of line-​of-​sight to caregivers by themselves. The risk of a sexually abused child acting out or re-​enacting that abuse with a classmate is alarmingly high.
In any event, back to the story – when bringing this to the attention of the owner, her suggestion was not to arrange that the aggressive/​violent child be closely supervised by an adult, but to offer to move _​our_​son to a different classroom (!). Sure, this would solve the problem for our son, but what about the safety of the other children still there?! If that’s the approach they wish to take, that’s their choice, obviously but upon finding that out, we made the decision to withdraw our son from Sandbox immediately. It may be a wonderful learning environment, but without proper consideration given to the children’s basic safety, it’s meaningless.
My wife and I both believe that the folks who work there genuinely care about their kids, and we both admire their openness towards children with special needs, but how they’re going about it is frankly dangerous to other children. With that kind of policy, it’s not a question of _​if_​, but _​when_​something bad (and completely avoidable) is going to happen there.