West Andover

My niece attends this school in the kindergarten section. Her teacher is good with her—that much is true, and that is what matters. However, the staff members who greet family members and parents have less-than-ideal attitudes; my experiences there on the occasions I visited were very negative.

St. Augustine School Andover scores low on all the dimensions of learning, teaching, emotional support and special education assessed by this web site. If you are going to have to deal with cliques, bullying and favoritism, you may as well save your $7k and go to a public school where you can get that for free. This school touts special education however, you are not going to get accommodations or an IEP. There is very subjective grading and once a student is labeled they will not get out of it. Most of the teachers are poor communicators and take a disheveled approach to the use of technology assigning homework through multiple platforms that young students must check up on nightly (google classroom, a proprietary web site and paper). I went to grad school and professors did not do that to us. The faculty and staff also post grades on work weeks late so it is very difficult to forecast a problem and work to address it with your student.

We have been at Pike for 8 years so far and my child is now in Upper School. Even though there are some learning differnces and neurodiversity my child has done very well and gotten lots of support. We are not at a point when it's not much needed any more. Most teachers have been pretty amazing. The social emotional teaching style in Lower School has been beyond fantatsic. Upper school definitely has a very different vibe - like a prep school almost. My child is always happy to go to school and has not come accross much bullying.