Julia

I would NOT recommend East Lake or Timber Ridge if your child has behavioral, emotional, ADHD, or other support needs. In our experience, discipline and suspensions were used instead of meaningful support and accommodations.If your child is anything outside of the “typical” box, please do your research. A child struggling with emotional regulation needs support—not to be constantly punished for struggling.These schools need to do better for children with different needs. Period.

Coming out of COVID 2022-2023, my child struggled with math (social distancing and virtual learning). We came from a different county and a pretty good charter school. Maybe it was my child’s homeroom teacher, but there was very little support to help her. We got her personal tutoring, and she improved, but it seemed as if the teacher blackballed our child. Early on, she made sarcastic comments that, looking back, should have prompted us to advocate for our daughter to be moved to a different classroom.Our daughter is pretty quiet, so we were especially jaded by a suspension she received for playing at recess. She had never been suspended before. She even won “Most Empathetic” early on. It seemed like her homeroom teacher purposely went out of her way to undermine our child’s confidence.Based on her grades in other classrooms with other teachers, she could have made honor roll, but with this one teacher, she missed it because of math by ONE POINT. Perhaps it wasn’t intentional and we are bitter, but the coincidences seemed too numerous to ignore.The problem is, the administration can come across as pompous and elitist. Our attempts to advocate for our child were not well received, and as another parent stated, there is very little understanding or emotional support from leadership.This school is very “political.” If you are not adding to the bottom line and your child hurts their test scores, you may not be a good fit here. We also moved here, and this was our child’s only year before middle school. Without having the rapport that other families had built over prior years, we often felt like outsiders.The environment is safe, and most teachers are pleasant, with the exception of our child’s homeroom teacher and the two main principals at the time. Maybe it simply wasn’t a good fit for us, but we felt it was necessary to share our experience in hopes that our review might help someone else avoid a similar one.