534 Eastern Ave NE, Grand Rapids, MI 49503

as a former Blandford school student, my experience was amazing. the only way to fully understand the greatness of this program is to experience it. the teachers push you to your limits and beyond. blandford is the place that I met my 5 best friends, and we are still as close as ever. the way they slip nature into the daily learning is simply amazing. I love when we went into the woods and learned about everything around us. sometimes we would even go out there to have a conversation about math! the teachers create a friendly environment for the kids, while making it easy for us to respect them. I loved every minute of it, even when I was struggling a bit. I hope that this post may convince you to let your child go on to what I thought of as the best experience of my life.

The metrics on this school are not as straightforward. As I imagine is the case for many schools that are on this website. In regards to the large gap between test scores and progress, students have a test score requirement to apply. As for progress, our personal experience saw exceptional progress, though not necessarily in test scores. Our student learned how to manage multiple projects with varying deadlines, work with a team, and how to study independently. Also, the metric on teacher to student ratio is off. There are two teachers that teach 2 subjects each and they work with half of the students at a time. The students rotate classrooms. Please do not take these scores at face value. There is so much learning and progress happening at John Ball Park Zoo School. Reach out to the school, or a parent or even a former Zooie themselves. Highly recommend this program.

Teachers weren’t helpful at all and were kind of not good at teaching. They also sometimes would favor some students and if someone did one “wrong” thing they would basically target them the whole year if something went wrong… but sometimes they were nice and fun