8523 S Kelsch Dr E, Sandy, UT 84093

We loved Peruvian Park before the new principal took over in the 2023-2024 school year. Since then, the environment has shifted in a way that doesn’t feel supportive or developmentally appropriate for kids. The current Principal's leadership style is old fashioned, too harsh and decisions often seem based on data and control rather than what children actually need.There’s been a disturbing focus on attendance numbers, with weekly reports about how many kids were absent, parents were encouraged to send kids to school with 101° fevers saying the nurse could adminster medicine, not only can kids not learn well with a 101° fever, this leads to more absences among other students and my children coming home with new illnesses repeatedly. Social time before school was removed, and recess is regularly taken away as punishment, even for students in Kindergarten. These choices show a lack of understanding of both child development and basic wellness.Communication between parents and teachers has also broken down. There’s little collaboration or transparency, which makes it hard to support our kids as a team. Perhaps this is in part because class sizes are excessively large.Academically, things didn’t live up to the high ratings we saw when researching the school. Peruvian Park is the SALTA (gifted and talented) magnet site, which boosts test scores. But in our experience, the general education side didn’t reflect that.These are just a few examples of why we ultimately left, there were multiple other leadership decisions that helped us decide that we no longer felt our kids were in a safe or healthy environment, emotionally or physically. We hope the school can return to its former strengths with more child-centered leadership.