Mathnasium, St. Louis MO

Amazing place! In the beginning my kids were frightened but after the first day they beg me to take them! Love the place you can see clear improvement on kid’s education!

Mathnasium Clayton/Ladue MO has been awesome for my accelerated 7 year old. He looks forward to math class every week. Scheduling a session is easy and the rewards for completion of assignments is a good motivator.

The staff at Mathnasium is top notch - always friendly, patient and helpful. Our child loves her classes there and the gamification of the lessons also boosts her drive to succeed and go back each week. We've been really impressed by how quickly our child has picked up concepts and how they are taught.

I think the system from Mathnasium is extremely good. My son attended Mathnasium in California for a few years, and then we continued in St Louis. Unfortunately, the centers in St Louis are incredibly badly operated with almost no concern for the students or parents, in sharp contrast with my prior experiences and I wish the brand did a quality control of their franchises. I finally decided that we would quit after repeated issues of quality and normal standards of care, which is very bad for us because we loved the system. I will share below a subset of problems we had to deal with.

Over the few years we attended the Ladue center, because their policy is to severely underpay their staff, almost all of the good instructors started leaving, replaced by nice but not nearly as motivated as the task would require. The center has kept telling us for many years that they are 'trying to hire' but obviously what they are ready to offer is completely insufficient for what a good tutor should earn. For $299 per month, we would hope that tutor would earn a decent compensation for tutoring a group of student but this is not the case. In fact, we had some great tutors when we joined and they all left because, as is now becoming all too common in other businesses, the center is offering unsustainable conditions that are only viable as a side gig.

Because of this, we noticed that the center does not have the bandwidth to correctly track progress across grades, with severe missing topics that we discovered were not done well in the school assessments or tests. The reason for this is that the staff has almost no time to review what progress has been made in a manner that is customized to where a student is. I was appalled to see our son was not doing better than many students, and all students with other tutors did much, much better. The system works, but not if it's administered in a standardized manner to all but tutors who come and go.

To add to these issues, but related, the center has implemented a taxing reservation system where appointments have to be reserved months in advance to have a decent spot. They close on one day of the week-end, removing one more day which would be ideal for families and forcing kids to do their session after school. It is not unusual that one has to pick up a 6: 30pm session. If we call them to reschedule, they will not answer the phone and send to an answering service that has to call back. The center main director Caitlin has no interest in resolving anything and, when confronted with repeated problems, just kept saying that she was sorry we felt this way and this was their policy, and that it was normal to make appointments. Certainly it is the prerogative of a business to manage their policies in any way they see fit, but this is irrelevant to the point I am raising that this business is only interested in making profits without any concern about the issues of parents and kids, in order to reduce quality to save on operating expenses. But I do not want to suggest any issue due to her, as I suspect she is like other employees being given no reasonable resources by the franchise owners to do a good job to resolve the issues that she uncovers.

I called the main center and I hope there can be more quality control of the franchises, as I am not sure this is not the right image for the brand. In summary, I remain a great fan of Mathnasium, but unfortunately, if you would like good quality tutoring here in St Louis, a tutor will be more effective. I shared my concerns with other parents here in the area, and found that most of them did know about Mathnasium and dropped out for similar related reasons.

Mathnasium Clayton-Ladue is one of our best investments for our son. It started two years ago with "I hate math" and within weeks shifted to "I love going there. " The team is paying attention to the mindset and results as well as has been supportive of making continuous progress.

5/11/23 Update: Our daughter STILL goes (7 years now) and will be taking Adv Geometry as a 9th grader next year, thanks to Mathnasium and their awesome staff! Over the years, they have tried tweaking things here and there to give the best service and accommodations for families and it's been SO incredibly helpful. Honestly, we still - all these years later - cannot recommend them enough. Our daughter's success and self-confidence means so much, and despite other commitments (like Jiu Jitsu 6 days a week), this is one thing we all agree to work around. It's so gratifying to see our daughter, who used to make herself ill from her anxiety, consistently getting As while placed in advanced math classes. She works hard, no doubt, but she's also had awesome support, so thank you Mathnasium!
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Our daughter used to have so much anxiety over math (and I'm talking about even kindergarten and 1st grade math, now) that we started to take her to Mathnasium. Could we have taught her ourselves? Sure, but she wouldn't listen to us and it was making me want to pull out everyone's hair - mine, hers, the dogs, no one was safe. We are so incredibly thankful to the amazing staff. They made it fun, which helped dispell her fear and anxiety when she was younger, and as she's getting older (she's in 7th now and still goes!) and things are getting harder, she's got a good foundation and support system that's helping her see this through. At one point, she even said she wanted to be a math tutor when she grows up! That's no longer the case, but regardless of what she will eventually do with her life, this has been an incredibly worthwhile investment in her success and our sanity.

We have been wowed by our daughter’s progress at Mathnasium. Since starting over a year ago, her attitude towards math has completely changed. She went from “I’m bad at math” to feeling confident about tackling new math concepts and looking forward to going to Mathnasium 3 times a week. She has mastered her initial objectives and we continue to send her because she loves it. Mathnasium has brought the joy of learning math back and we couldn’t be happier about her progress! My only complaint is that we wish there were more available slots at prime time after school and on weekends when they kids have more free time. Keep up the great work!