CNA programs-HELP!

College of Medical Training in Lakewood is pretty good.

Not sure of a good place to go, but I am currently enrolled in A-Plus Nursing Assistant Training School and am extremely disappointed with the experience. The director/instructor of the school is unprofessional, demeaning, and rude and it is not conducive to learning. He thinks he is being humorous, but it is often at the expense of his students. The only up side is that it is cheap and you get certifications such as CPR/AED and First Aid are included in the tuition, but not worth having an instructor who is unable to answer student's questions without putting them down (if he answers them at all).

Hope that helps, at least to weed out the bad!

I liked Nursing Assistant Training school (Tukwila), Hadra was a great teacher :)

Jesse

I'm in Kamanga CNA school in Tacoma and I love it. It is three weeks long and goes from 9am-3pm M-F but they have night classes, part time classes, and weekend only classes with different schedules. For $550 I got my book and all the materials I need, they send the paperwork in for my NAR and we got CPR/First Aid and HIV Blood borne pathogen certification done last week. We're doing our clinicals in a nursing home in Gig Harbor all next week. I am very confidant about taking the board exam. I've made some great friends and good job contacts with other Nursing students from Pierce College, Walla Walla College, UW, PLU, TCC, Highline, and OC. It has been a really good experience and I would recommend this school to any of my pre-nursing friends. I have recommended it actually!

One note: they only take 20 people per class and it fills up fast. I put a deposit down as soon as I knew which class I wanted. Also you can't miss any class so make sure it works with your schedule so you don't waste your time and $$$. Attendance is mandatory. Lastly, you will have to go home and do self study it's pretty fast and they cover a lot in three weeks. We had a take home test the first night and every night for a week and a half. Don't sign up if you can't make the commitment. Good luck!:)

Hello,

I attended Kamanga in October-November and did there weekend class. I took the class because of the flexible class schedule and it was the least expensive around. I passed the state test in January and at that time the school was getting a 100% pass rate. I also took fundamentals of caregiving and nurse delegation class there. All the staff at the school was very nice and overly willing to help. On our last day of clinicals Mary the owner actually paid for our dinner and sat down and talked to each of us about our experience. It's definitely a great choice. Good Luck

Lauren

Hi,

I'm thinking about going to Kamanga to get my CNA license, and I was wondering: Are all the clinicals included in the class times the schedule lays out?

I.E. the program I want is weekends 2-10pm for 5 weeks. Are all the clinicals and everything included in those 16 hrs a week, because I have a full time job and am hoping I can just request weekends off.

Thank you in advance for your help!

Nathan,

I attended Kamanga back in 2008. I learned enough to pass the written/practical state exams the first time through, but I couldn't actually get a job as a CNA (in a hospital, anyway, which was the only one I was willing to settle for in prep for ARNP school) until very recently, and I think part of this had to do with the fact that Kamanga isn't widely recognized.

Many of my classmates already had non-nursing 4-year degrees (as I did) and felt fairly frustrated by the teaching. The teacher, Mary, really means well and has an enormous heart and love of nursing, but the school was so terribly unorganized that it was a very trying time for me, as it was for many of my classmates. From registration to the first day of class to clinicals, we never knew what was going on or what we were expected to do. Some days the lessons were little more than a video. Sometimes lessons plans were changed mid-lesson; on one particular day, we half-completed several multiple-choice chapter quizzes only to have the instructor interrupt us, tell us that the schedule had changed, and then collect the quizzes and throw them away. The teachers would leave class in the middle of lectures to take personal phone calls, leaving us all waiting dumbfounded in the classroom for 10 minutes at a time. We kept ourselves sane by reminding each other that this was just one small hoop we needed to jump through for our futures.

The time we spent actually on the floor was not enough to learn to be a CNA! I briefly took a job at a LTC facility, and felt so ill-prepared that I promptly resigned and kept looking for jobs I felt I could actually do well in.

The price and convenience are very appealing, but if I had to do it over again, I'd look at taking a course at one of Seattle's many Community Colleges. I think it would provide a much better experience. I've also heard great things about the Nursing Assistant Training Institute in Shoreline (10 mins north of Seattle). It seemed to me that there was a deeply-ingrained culture of disorganization that permeated most everything we experienced. I know that Kamanga produces a fair amount of CNAs, so I sincerely hope that things have changed for the better over there.

Best of luck,

Kendra

I recently completed Kamanga's day program, and I have to agree with Kendra. There were definitely parts of the course that were unorganized, and there were several times where I was frustrated. If your goal is to work in Long Term Care, then Kamanga is a good start, as that is what they design the program around completely. However, if your goal is to work in a hospital setting (or anything other than LTC), I would probably recommend a community college program - although I do not have any experience with the other private companies that offer CNA programs. If you are simply using it as a pre-requisite for an RN or BSN program, then Kamanga is probably not a bad choice - there were several girls in my class that were doing so, with no plans to work as a CNA.

Good Luck!

I agree that A Plus Nursing school fails miserably! It is not A plus at all but a demeaning cna program, if you can call it a cna program since the teacher is completely rude and does not teach!! He simply collects fees and does not help anyone learn their skills so hardly anyone is sent to the State for their testing (only 3 people passed our class out of about 30 and he was not even in the room when they tested) so he can say that his pass rate is high.He only seems to care about his pass rate and not about teaching anything. he is rude and unprofessional and I honestly feel bad to have this night mare of an experience. I wish I would have gone anywhere else but A Plus Nursing School. I Do Not recommend this program for anyone.