Donny Gilbert

Review of Coral Reef Academy

The first signs that something was wrong was when ...

The first signs that something was wrong was when I was informed the daycare had given my son a bottle that was not his. I walked in one day to one worker playing with another baby girl with a pen and lightly tickling her face. The same pen next to the changing station that was used for daily poop reports. A mobile baby crawled up to a non-mobile baby and hit him across the face with a toy pretty hard. The baby cried the entire time I was there and I watched them move the baby who was hit to the other side of the room and placed him alone on the floor. They told the other baby not nice . My son came home before he even hit his two-month mark with a daily report that said he had eaten solids. I would take him home and check his diaper and it hadn t been changed in so long that his poop was glued to his diaper and skin. When my son developed a rash we were asking that the daycare slowly ween him to another formula as we were doing at home. When I had asked him if he needed more formula after telling them to go back to using Enfamil, I was told that he was just being given what the daycare provided because he ran out. I was never informed of him running low or even out of formula. I found out the hard way baby powder was being used on him as it created a sludge in his neck after doing what the doctor told us to do for the redness that was occurring. I heard an employee from another room discussing in the front office how to write home a report that a child had climbed onto something and got hurt. The office warned the adult or teacher to change the wording to a self-injury . Not what I want to hear as a parent. The adults in the infant room would correct each other in front of me. You know you can t put a baby in the crib with a bib on! It really had me thinking what else are you incompetent about?
#10: I got another form stating that my son had eaten solids. Having dismissed the last one as a made up form, I had found after hours of pain and a suppository, my son had his first solid poop before he was even three months old. #11: After surprising them when I had gotten out of work early, I had found my son screaming in a room where his soft cries were drowned out by many other babies. He had not eaten in 5 hours. He eats every 4 hours, and sometimes 8 ounces. I started becoming emotionally overwhelmed when I was told he never smiles. He only smiles and laughs at home and rarely cries unless hungry.
The last problem still gets me worked up and I guess I should have listened to my instincts sooner and stopped seeing any of the concerns above as minor. They had recently implemented a no blanket rule so that no parent could say another baby was seen using another baby s blanket. I walked into the facility and looked around at the full room and could not see my son. I stared at a baby in a walker near the door crying in the corner trying to figure out how to turn the walker Snot running into his mouth... A worker noticed me looking at him and had told another worker to wipe off his mouth. I looked at another screaming baby who was doing tummy time with full chunks of boogers and snot on her face and she told the lady to wipe off her mouth too. I suddenly realized my son was completely underneath one of their standard daycare blankets in a fold out bassinet. You couldn t see his entire body or face. When I realized it, I hurried to pull him out. He was sweaty from the heat of not getting air and from crying at the top of his lungs with his eyes shut. They informed me he was OK and just fighting sleep the entire day. He has not been back since.