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Review content:
*UPDATE 5/11*
Evergreen is now THREATENING TO SUE ME for libel if I write "further defamatory statements" about them. Can parents no longer inform one another without the threat of legal action? I wrote about this school in an attempt to help other parents make an informed choice, and now I am faced with a potential lawsuit.
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I know that when people read horrible reviews online, that they tend to think that the reviewer might be crazy, or that their experience might be a fluke, but I hope that any parents considering this school will take what I have to report about it seriously.
This school is terrible. Before we sent our child here I read the review on this site about how Evergreen is a "glorified daycare" with frequently absent teachers, and I ignored it. I wish that I hadn't. On two separate occasions in the short amount of time that our child attended, we showed up at school for pick up/ drop off to find his classroom WITHOUT A TEACHER in it. And I don't mean that the teacher had stepped out. I mean that they were absent, completely. Two and three year old children were in the classroom alone, totally unsupervised, and their teachers were not on the premises at all. Once was on pickup, and my husband picked up our child and searched for a teacher before finally leaving and leaving the other kids alone; another time (which was the cause of us pulling our child out), I went to drop off our child and the classroom was full of kids but with no teachers. I sat in the class for 15 minutes waiting, but no teacher came, and there was no one in the office. The front door was unlocked. The kids in the classroom were running wild, and some had probably been there for half an hour. One very small girl, about 18 months old, was being bullied by the bigger kids and was crying, but there was no one to help her. Other kids were pulling things from the shelves and spilling beans all over the floor. Other parents arrived and were as shocked as I was, and we all talked about how we were going to pull our kids out and about how things like this had happened to us all there before.
What is even more disturbing that this is that when I went to pick up my child's things and withdraw him, I was confronted by the head of the school who told me that teachers had been there on the day in question (I was imagining that I was the only adult in the classroom???) and that maybe my child and I aren't ready for school. So basically, she told me that there is something wrong with me for finding that unacceptable. When I asked her what she planned to do differently in the future to ensure that these children wouldn't be left alone like that, she said, "Nothing. This sort of thing happens at every school." So, they took no responsibility whatsoever. She actually stood in the hallway defensively yelling at me during the school day and in front of my child. It was unbelievable.
Think carefully before sending your child here. There are some very nice people teaching here but the administration is a nightmare. They don't respond to emails, they don't take parent concerns seriously (they'll tell you that you must not understand the Montessori method, as if you're an idiot), they don't keep their doors secured, and half the time there is no one in the office or answering the phone or watching the door. Very small children are literally wandering through the halls with no one watching them, because the classroom doors are left open--we are talking about toddlers here, not elementary kids. It is just not a safe environment. I worry for the kids still going there.
This is NOT Montessori, like the previous reviewer wrote--it is the result of a crappy management and of irresponsibility and I don't know what else. They are not a non-profit, as one reviewer pointed out, and that bothers me as well. I hate to say this because of what it implies for the kids, but this school is a lawsuit waiting to happen.
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