A Parent's Testimonial- Treated Her Like a Criminal

For a decade, our daughter has been enrolled in this school since the age of three. We selected it primarily for its convenient daycare services, given our working schedules. While generally keeping a hands-off approach to school matters, we intervened a few times when we felt the school's practices conflicted with our values. One instance was when we discovered the school publicly displaying a list of children's names alongside stamps indicating whether their parents had contributed to fundraisers or not. Although we understand the need for fundraising in private schools, we thought this approach went too far. When we brought it to their attention they agreed and removed the list. Later we discovered that the list was back outside the classroom. Once they realized we knew they removed it again. 

Two years ago, one week before the school started, we received an email from the school announcing that the math teacher has left and a new teacher was taking over without providing adequate information about the qualifications of the new teacher. We immediately reached out to the school and asked for more information and expressed our concern that the school announced this just a week before the beginning of the school year. The response from the school was that they were surprised with the timing of our inquiry because they announced that to the kids in the spring. Our daughter was not aware of this announcement but regardless, we found the school’s response very unprofessional. Why would they ever consider that announcing something like this to the kids and not the parents would constitute appropriate communication?  After a couple of emails and the school refusing to provide additional details about the new teacher, we decided to pull our daughter out of the school. So, we announced to the school that we would pull our daughter and as we were inquiring information about the official withdrawal process, the head of the school sent us a letter terminating our daughter from the school at the end of the school day claiming that we the parents lost trust to the school.  This was clearly a vindictive and unnecessary move by the school validating our impression of their unprofessional approach to dealing with issues.  After the termination email, we rushed to school with our daughter to collect her things but the principal did not allow her to get inside the school and say goodbye to her friends.  All these happened without even the school administration trying to meet with us to understand our concerns. It is important to note that our daughter was, according to their own assessment, an exemplary and brilliant student that was great to have in the classroom and helpful to all her classmates.  She followed the school rules to the letter for 10 years and the school treated her like a criminal because they wanted to punish the parents for asking reasonable questions. 

Upon reflecting on our experience, we realized that the school's approach was to remove anyone they considered problematic, whether it be students or parents, even if the situations did not remotely warrant such drastic measures. 

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