Guidepost Montessori - Broadlands Reviews 1

We started with guidepost in 2022 with our child in the Nido classroom. We were very happy for quite a while, but unfortunately we watched the company completely implode. They were hemmoraging staff, including many head of school turnovers, abruptly closing locations, and the new hires didn't always work out well. Our sons first Nido and Toddler guides were magical, but as things changed he found himself in a toxic children's house environment where he started to develop some behavioral issues. The school handled this extremely poorly, and were constantly sending home ouchie reports for incidents that no adult even observed or could explain. When I came to observe I could see that our son was constantly being restricted and controlled by the older kids, causing him to hit. We changed his classroom but it was too late, the culture was set, and his attitude was locked in. He is a sweet little boy, and this did not need to happen. We were already planning on following the lead of dozens of other families who left this school for somewhere better, but when we abruptly got a call on a Friday saying he was being dis-enrolled effective immediately we were really caught off guard. We had many, many, ouchie reports coming home where our child had bonked another friend, but never any kind of formal escalation or notice that something like this might happen. At this point it's been 5 weeks and Guidepost is still processing our refunded tuition. They kicked out kid out of school effective immediately but have not returned the many thousands of dollars intuition we prepaid. It's inexcusable. Montessori is great, don't get me wrong, and we have seen a lot of benefits from our sons time here. That said, we absolutely would recommend you go somewhere else and avoid a company that has already declared bankruptcy once and is spiraling the drain. Google Guidepost bankruptcy and you'll see that they pursued a fast growth strategy that absolutely did not work out. They have restructured and have no real plan or proven strategy.

Edit: after the below reply, which sounds nice, offers support, but provides no contact information, Trustpilot invited me to edit my review. So here goes: for anyone who understands bankruptcy and restructuring, the idea that they are a "new company" in any meaningful sense is laughable. Leadership at the local level is unchanged except to the extent that the "floating head of school" from our time has moved on. If you want to read some of the details about what really happened Forbes did a great article on this.

You'll see that everyone moved from Higher Ground to Guidepost Global in May, and then chapter 11 happens in June. One of the things that happened, just to emphasize how not-new leadership is, is that a dude named Steven Xu who was originally responsible for HGE/Guidepost in China. Because of a change to Chinese law affecting companies owned by non-Chinese companies operating schools had to take all their schools into a company he called Cosmic Education. Fast forward to today, and Steven is the Global CEO of Guidepost Global with Cosmic having invested in the restructuring.

Aaaanyway, this company is what it is. No need to editorialize. Just Google some key terms like "guidepost bankruptcy reddit" or read the Forbes article.

Now, if you are like me, or like one of the 4 families from our old school that are in our friend group and STILL waiting for your refunds (they owe one of our friends $20k) and have been told that they normally operate with a 30 day refund timeline but are currently at 90 days... What you'll want to do is just get really loud like I did here.

About a week after writing this review and a few days after their reply we got an email saying the leadership was making an exception and the check was in the mail the next day. Nobody else has been so lucky.