5859 Derringer Rd
Rapid City, SD 57703

Not so good, a lot of bullying and not much done about it, some good teachers, but also some that should not be teaching. Ineffective administration, I would not recommend this school in it's present state.

Bullying is rampant at Douglas Middle school. They don’t do anything about it and try to sweep it under the rug. My child was attacked by another child and the school officer said it wasn’t “assault”. The current principal told me “our school isn’t nearly as bad as others.” As to suggest bullying is normal and completely bypassed the situation at hand. The previous principal forgot to remove us from an email thread where I was concerned about our child’s safety, and he wrote back, “This should be interesting. I will be in tomorrow. Keep me appraised of how this conversation goes please.” He made it very clear he didn’t care for our child’s safety. Obviously this is a trend with the current principal as well. They don’t have good firewalls on their computers so your child can search ANYTHING and EVERYTHING. Do they correct it? Nope. They just punish the child and go on their merry way. If your child has their computer privileges taken away, they will have an extremely difficult time getting any homework done. We had issues with their phones contacting us and we missed a lot of updates. We checked with our carrier and with the company that made our phones and it was determined it was their phone lines. Again, we were blamed for it and it wasn’t fixed. It’s extremely hard to see what homework is due and where we can find it to help our child. It’s very much “let the parents figure it out”. Our children’s medical info wasn’t properly entered in and we only found out after our child was attacked and we inquired if emergency services were provided for child. They looked at us funny and asked why. They pulled our child’s info and it showed it had no medical information on it but when they pulled our intake form, his medical information was printed neatly for them to copy down into their system. This school is ok (at best) if you have a cookie cutter child. If your child needs any extra help, they don’t help like they should and it doesn’t help your child prepare themselves for high school.

A school where you call the office to be accosted because you are going to pick up the child instead of them riding a bus home. They ignore parent requests until threatening going to the district office to file complaints, even though the requests are for things that were listed in the child's IEP. I would be amazed if a school could handle a child with special needs any worse. To think the military sent me here as this was supposed to be good support for my special needs child.