40th & A

I would not recommend this school to anyone who would want their kids to have a good education, this school has only caused heartache and emotional damage and continued to disrupt my kids is learning throughout the entire year. This school provides uneducated and emotionally distressed teachers and administration to their students.

Bluestem has been a godsend for our family, and is the first thing I would recommend for any family with some neurodiversity. My son has ADHD and is gifted, and in the public school system he was not getting any support for the gifted-ness and was only getting negative attention for his tendency to fidget and get out of his seat at inappropriate times. We pulled him after he came home in first grade saying "I hate reading. I hate math." Every night was a fight to get his homework done (even though evidence shows that homework that early has very little benefit and can be harmful), because he'd spent all day trying to "be good" and was so burned out by the end of the day.Bluestem has completely turned him around. He is excited to learn, engaged at school, and we haven't needed to start stimulants for his ADHD because he simply doesn't need them - the classroom is designed to allow him to move around, to focus on one thing for 3 hours at a time, and to follow his passions by choosing project topics that interest him. He had been bullied for being weird at daycare, but as one parent said in a PTO meeting, "at Bluestem, your kid will never be the weirdest kid in the class" (and it is true, the whole class is full of delightful little weirdos who are comfortable in their own skin). It took a year for him to adjust to the Montessori way of doing things, but his attitude was noticeably different within the first 3 weeks of school. Bluestem teaches students conflict resolution and social graces -- teachers mediate but demonstrate how to handle conflict as it arises naturally in a group of individuals. Students and teachers collectively work out classroom rules and norms. The school is also wonderful about communicating with parents about good and bad behavior as necessary. Children learn to be welcoming, trans kids are supported, and lessons include components of anti-racism and restorative justice. A lesson on colonialism involved groups of kids building cities and expanding, while the teacher went around stealing blocks and building their own city, and concluded with a class discussion about how the kids' cities couldn't ever be rebuilt to what they were, but they could work together to build a better set of cities together. I've been quietly jealous of my kids over the past two years that we've been at Bluestem - both wishing that i could go to their classes, and also wishing that I'd had the opportunity to be at a Montessori school as a child.