HAYS COUNTY — Among parents' top concerns in a childcare facility are safety, reliability and the well-being of their child. For some parents of children who attended either The Learning Experience — Kyle or The Learning Experience — Buda, the choice initially seemed easy, but they would soon experience troubling signs that made them second-guess their decision.
Safety
One of the main concerns that parents had when reaching out to the Hays Free Press is the student-teacher ratio. According to Texas Health and Human Services, the maximum number of children a caregiver should have for toddlers ranges from 11 to 18, depending on age.
Courtney Neukam, a parent of a former student at TLE Kyle, said this was not the case in her experience. She was informed by Child Protective Services that her daughter had been spoken to about whether she was ever left unsupervised. When Neukam questioned her daughter herself, her daughter confirmed that there were times she was left alone in the restroom because she was unable to open the door or that she sometimes couldn’t find a teacher to ask a question.
“My kid is luckily pretty self-sufficient,” said Neukam. “But it is a concern at the end of the day because what if something had happened? She’s pretty self-sufficient on her own, but with 30 other kids, what happens when somebody steals a toy and starts a fight? Who’s going to break that up? Or if somebody fell and actually, God forbid, got hurt. How long is that kid going to be hurt before somebody would have known?”
She also noted that there was a day when she went to pick up her daughter and the teacher didn’t know where she was.
“There were a solid 30-35 kids in that room and one teacher. For a solid 15 minutes, the teacher couldn’t find my kid,” said Neukam, distressed at the memory. “I had a teacher go, ‘I don’t know where she is.’”
After being sent to see if her child had “accidentally” gone outside with another teacher, she eventually discovered her daughter hiding in the original room she entered.
Safety was also a red flag for former Kyle employee Janet Hanshew. Prior to her background check results being sent to TLE Buda, she claimed that management had her scheduled to work. When she voiced this concern, they allegedly grew angry.
According to Stacy Maas, who had a child attend TLE Kyle, parents were not allowed past the foyer, but were let back into classrooms after she contacted Brenda Schlutz, TLE regional manager.
“I swear it looked like two full classrooms of kids, but there’d be one adult or one teacher in there. So, I know for a fact that they were not staffing correctly,” Maas said.
Chelsea Martinez, former TLE Buda parent, noted that “it was like a revolving door of teachers.”
According to the Texas Health and Human Services, the following is the number of employees who left each facility in recent years:
TLE Kyle
- 11 in 2020
- 22 in 2021
- 40 in 2023
