Countryside YMCA | Lebanon — Local services in Lebanon

This review is for the daycare only - not the gym.

My family switched our two children to the Y in the summer of 2018. We initially had a great experience there. The facility is expansive and allows for a wide range of enrichment classes such as swimming and gymnastics. The rooms are large and clean. The rates are reasonable.

Your child's experience will vary greatly based upon the room they are in. There are some great rooms with great teachers, and some awful rooms with awful teachers.

My son was initially in a fantastic room and loved going to daycare here. He was then forced to move up a room due to his age, despite him not hitting a number of developmental milestones before he should have been moved. One of those included being potty trained, which was mandatory for the new room, but he was nowhere near ready. We protested but were told he HAD to move rooms and that potty training would be no issue in the new room. What actually happened was him peeing and pooping his pants for the better part of the year with the teachers just getting frustrated with him over it. I remember once coming to pick him up only to find him in the bathroom alone and crying, naked from the waist down, covered in pee and poop.

These events embarrassed and humiliated him, causing both emotional regression and behavioral issues. His teachers began to treat him with disdain and the cycle of bad behavior due to negative reinforcement set in. He was even physically abused by one of the teachers (this is not an accusation, it was documented and admitted to), which resulted in her dismissal but no effort was expended on their part to remediate the damage caused by what he was going through. They even fought us for months on switching him to a better room because it would interfere with their numbers.

Eventually they implemented a behavior policy which mandated sending kids home for incidents such as if they ran away from teachers or disrupted nap time. So they started sending my son home once or twice a week which began causing attendance issues for my wife and I at work. My son figured out that if he misbehaved enough, he could get sent home (which is where he wanted to be). At that point there was no going back and he was dead set on doing everything he could to get sent home. This is an irrational policy that was likely put in place to help lighten the workload on already overwhelmed teachers to slow down turnover.

We are now in the process of moving our son to another daycare and will eventually move our daughter out as well. This is very unfortunate because a lot of this would have probably been prevented with more sensible policies from administration. Advancing children to higher expectations before they are mentally/emotionally ready is counter-intuitive and sending children home when they misbehave will only incentivize that bad behavior. They are able to get away with these ridiculous initiatives because they have a wait list to get in. Other daycares would feel more inclined to work with parents more closely in order to retain their business. The Y demands good behavior or you're on your way out because they don't need your business.

I can't express how disappointed we are in the decisions made by the administration as well as the performance of a select few teachers. They have created unnecessary problems in what could be an otherwise great daycare and negated the good, hard work performed by some of the outstanding teachers they do have.

If your child has behavioral issues or isn't already right where they need to be developmentally, please consider a different daycare as the Y is not going to be able to work with you on improving...

I only have experiences with the swimming and gymnastics classes, but they’re bad enough it'll be a long time before I give the rest of this YMCA a chance.

Ok so last summer, my daughter did a week of swim lessons with Miss Sue. Honestly, no complaints. Sue was incredible and I’d give her and that week five stars. But then in the fall, I enrolled my son and everything was awful. First off, the instructional pool was closed, but the class said it was going to meet in the instructional pool. I never received any communication saying differently and was running all over the Y trying to figure out where the class was on our first day. It was in the family aquatic center. This was an unacceptable alternative, as it was loud and you absolutely could not hear the instructor. Also, the instructor kept changing, but all of them were equally terrible. One of them even commented when my son was melting down, "the great part about being the instructor is that the crying kids aren't my problem." Horrible. Miss Sue had always gotten involved and helped any of the emotional issues my daughter had during a lesson. Anyway, we stopped going to classes because wasting the money seemed like the better option.

On the gymnastics side of things, my daughter did last "season" from fall 2022-2023 and we had no problems. My daughter had a sweet teacher named Grace who taught the class the entire season and everything was great. Fast forward to the 2023-2024 session. HORRIBLE. There appeared to be a lot of turnover in March 2024 and no one knew what the hell was going on anymore. My daughter had a new instructor every week, they kept moving her to other classes (against our wishes) because of their poor planning and staffing issues. One night, we got an email that her class was being canceled (with less than 90 minutes notice) due to staffing. Except that the the class mentioned in the email was not the right time or age group for my daughter. I called and called and couldn't get any response from the gymnastics department and eventually had to get ahold of the operator to get an answer from her. I was informed that my daughters enrollment was moved to this other class they were canceling. HOW?! We had been attending a Tuesday, 5:20pm class and this one was at 4:30pm. I told them this was wrong, and they said they would "fix it." They moved her back to the right time slot, but the wrong age class. We had wanted to keep my daughter with the same group of kids, but they moved her based on her birthday without telling us. Honestly, we got so tired of fighting with the new, incompetent staff we finally just let it go. But then they didn't even communicate with us about when the session was ending. Everything I could find on the website demonstrated that the class would go through the final week of May, but when we showed up for her final class, we were told it had ended the week before. The front desk lady informed us that she had to tell a LOT of families there were no gymnastics classes, so it's not like this is an us issue. Additionally, other months that have fewer classes were always prorated for the fewer classes. This wasn't true for May, and therefore we were cheated out of money.

I reached out to the gymnastics department, again, no answer. No return call. Just an email from Megan Angel saying "I'm sorry this was not communicated more directly." Ma'am, it was not communicated AT ALL.

So yeah, we had good experiences in the past, but lately, Countryside Y has been awful. We are not re-enrolling in any swimming or gymnastics and will happily pay more money for a better...

As a member of the ymca, I wanted to share a very disturbing experience from my visit at the countryside ymca today in Lebanon,Ohio in an attempt to bring awareness to others.

While in the gymnasium section of the facility, my brother, my friend and I - all current members who had already checked in at the entrance desk- were approached by a gentleman wearing a shirt with a sheriff logo, allegedly named Antonio, and a YMCA staff member who was working at the time.

The ymca employee, allegedly named Elizabeth(she disrespectfully refused to give me her name when I asked), said to the three of us “what’s up guys what are you doing over here, are you lost ?” As if we were not allowed to be in the gym. Before we could answer her strange question, the man with the sheriff logo says to us with a finger pointed, “are you members here because I have never seen you before and that makes me suspicious of you”

He then, seemingly impersonating a sheriff on duty, as his shirt suggested, proceeds to tell us to SHOW him our PHOTO IDENTIFICATION. (Which of course we didn’t do)

*All the while, the ymca employee is standing by this man’s side , looking directly at us, as if we needed to respond to this man, who was just another member like us, which she was fully aware of.

That is what is hurtful and sad.

The ymca cannot control the potential disgusting, racist, bias perspectives and beliefs of some people that may belong there as members. But however, it is a SHAME, that an EMPLOYEE of the countryside YMCA, would TAKE PART IN, enable, encourage and condone a situation like that to transpire.

Her name is Elizabeth, she did not want to provide to me her name and was extremely disrespectful to all 3 of us during and after the situation. Nor did she apologize in any way for the situation happening. A situation that was clearly premeditated, that she witnessed, and that she clearly had dealings in.

It’s very scary to think how that situation would have progressed if that was someone who couldn’t defend/stand up for themselves like we did in that moment.

Imagine if that was a minor or a child who is supposed to entrust their safety to an employee in their presence. An employee that would have encouraged that ymca member and STRANGER to impersonate a sheriff, and to demand another member’s photo identification, for looking “suspicious”(which is code for profiling and discrimination), in a gym they pay to exercise in.

Sad & Sickening. #ymca #ymcakids #ymcafamily #ymcacommunity...