Blue Mountain Elementary School

St Vrain School District has succeed in creating a Spanish speaking only school with no diversity. Since 2007 the percentage of hispanic population went from 50% to 91% in 2015. If the district created a school that exculded Hispanic there would be an uproar. It is billed as a bilingual school but all the monatary resources are allocated to teaching spanish speakers english. English speakers were never taught any spanish. When we purchased our home we were excited that our son could walk the block to our neighborhood school. After my son had been bullied for 3 years and could hardly read we had to transfer him to Burlington Elementary in 3 grade where it took him 2 years to catch up his reading. This situation has also led to huge discipline problems with the Indian Peaks kids at Sunset MS. I strongly discourage anyone from sending their child to this school.

My only quibble about this school was how they did looped years. Before enrolling my son in 2nd grade, I was informed about it, but I assumed it was K-1, 2-3, 4-5. I enrolled my son as a new student but what I was not told was that looping started in grade 1. My fault for not asking questions, but boy did it make the adjustment period very difficult on my kid. I would not have enrolled him if I had known that he would be the only new student in a classroom with a a full year of established routines and friendships. Thank God we got over that.

At this school, I have experienced difficulties about my race, and some teachers have acted like this was never a problem, or acted as if they never heard about it. This school is good in the other categories, but not that much for safety.

This is my review of middle school here. The teachers are great and really care about us. The environment is nice, it feels more like a living room than a classroom, which makes it way easier to get work done. The curriculum is good, it’s challenging but if you ask for help, the teachers make it really clear and easy to understand. We have a time called self peace, which is 15 minutes of wordless calm music with the lights off where you just get to do anything that’s silent. Drawing, reading, knitting, napping, etc. it’s nice to just relax for a little bit. My experience in 4th-6th grade was a trainwreck. The teachers were not very dedicated to the job, or were dedicated, but didn’t teach well. Two of them were great though. In 6th grade, I was struggling with math, and my teachers response was to just not make me do math. Our teacher was nice, but she didn’t have any control over us. She let us just sit and talk, instead of doing work. Now that I’m in 7th grade, I’m actually learning well, and I enjoy going to school. Everyone gets along well and the teachers are great at helping us resolve conflict. There isn’t really bullying here. At our last social we were jamming out to let it go and it was fun to see a bunch of teenagers acting like we were 5 again.

Our experience started off well and we had a long history with the school for 5 years. Then we had a disagreement, which the owners were unwilling to meet with us for. If they had, then we would have stayed, but we were told a meeting would be, and I quote "Pointless". I think that says enough to parents who are looking at schools. Your complaints and tries at being partners with this school is "pointless". They have shown to be unbending so for us to have continued there would have been "pointless". As we looked at the public records for education licensing and reached out to other families who left this year we found many things, which the school had lied to us about from day 1. Overall, as a business, because in Colorado private schools are small businesses, they are awful in customer service and improvement. As teachers, I have to say that they are awful, because they lied about the accreditation when we enrolled for preschool. The founder who is acting principal never got a principal certification from Colorado, and his teaching license has been expired. There is no board overseeing the school's administration, which means families are left to the mercy of the founders' whims. I cannot, in good conscience, promote this school any longer because of the misrepresentations I found, and their unwillingness to even just talk. Please look at other schools to educate your children.