Marin Preparatory School

This is a challenging review to write.We were a transfer family from SFUSD and were so excited to join St. Philip's several years ago after Covid. We loved the community, parental involvement, promise of rigor and faith-based teaching with kindness.While the elementary school is wonderful, middle school (MS) was an anxiety-ridden mess. My youngest started in 1st grade and he immediately began to thrive. Their 1st grade teacher is exceptional and takes great pride in her craft. She also has a kind foundation so that sense of psychological safety is there. The students feel safe to learn, make mistakes and grow.There have been changes in the MS teachers, so hopefully they have improved. But the experience for my eldest was not good. While she admits the teacher was good at pushing and she learned a lot, the environment was unnecessarily harsh. The teacher comes across as bright and more than capable, but she picked on some students while others were clearly favored. This created an anxious and toxic environment. Students routinely cried, including my eldest which is completely out of character. So much for psychological safety. We were relieved to make it thru the year and hopeful that the next would improve... we were wrong: the next grade teacher left and the replacement was the worst teacher we have experienced.Our eldest is bright and has been testing several years ahead of grade level and was recently accepted into all honors programs at competitive SF high schools. But at StP she received multiple D's with this teacher. We had stopped looking at the progress reports because she always received straight A's so it was a shock when she brought home her report card. Shame on us for not checking in, but shame also for that teacher to not reach out and ask if anything was wrong. It turned out our child was depressed. The infractions were petty, almost like it was meant to break the spirit and force students to submit. The quality of teaching was not good, our child went backwards in math. The teacher was demeaning and referred to students as dogs. There was SO.MUCH.YELLING. The MS teachers need to be re-trained with coping skills and how to teach tweens with compassion. We were nervous to leave, but once we did the relief in our eldest was palpable. We have put this behind us, but sharing as there is not much info from MS families.

Overall, it’s an untrustworthy operation with opaque communication and bad faith business practices. Academic commitment is good-not-great, performing arts is mediocre (relative to how it’s showcased), and, most importantly, civility and behavioral imperatives are insisted upon, but not modeled. Stay far, far away.