Briarwood Elementary School

Administration is severly lacking at this school.

Your experience will differ from grade-to-grade and teacher to teacher. We have had mainly great teachers, but they are often hamstrung by students who they cannot control and the school fails to have anywhere near sufficient paras on-staff to deal with students with emotional or intellectual disabilities. This leads to classrooms that are often disrupted by a few students who are not getting the support they need.While this may be general teaching guidance across the state, the school also focuses always on the students furthest behind. Students who are above average are often bored and could take on significantly more difficult work while remedial students are aided, but often the extra or more challenging material provided (if it is) is not close to sufficient.The school operates in a cloud of secrecy. There are significant violent incidents that happen in the school that are never reported to parents, even ones involving your own child. Children under IEPs are typically allowed to get away with murder with the administration trying to keep it hushed up. In an incident last school year, a student was thrown bodily across a gym and severely injured. There was no report to parents. My own student has been assaulted on several occasions, but only if there is significant blood drawn is there ever a notice sent home.There is also a cloak of secrecy around gender transitions in the school. A classroom had a student transition and no prior notice was provided to the parents of other students in the classroom. This is a class that has not yet had sex ed, thus students witnessed a name change ceremony and some students were likely warned about misgendering this child without even having a concept yet about human sexuality. This is a pretty hot-button issue, but the end result here is kids coming home to parents incredibly confused and despondent not understanding what they just witnessed.Not particular to the school but district as a whole, Olathe Schools transferred to FastBridge testing over Map Testing. The move, as far as I can tell, was all about saving money. The testing is inferior and teachers years into it still don't know how to explain it in full. This testing is detrimental to all students. Some of the testing is speed based, with data entry on an iPad. This is detrimental to student scores due to the need to enter rapidly on a touchscreen vs. a keyboard. This testing is setting students back.This school and Olathe Schools are in crisis.

Th teachers have no patience for the kids. They get frustrated and don’t want to help them learn. They don’t do their jobs.