Tumwater Middle School

My daughter is in Kindergarten and is being bullied and harassed by a boy in her class. I transferred to this school less than 2 months ago becuase she wanted to learn Spanish. In 2 months time she has been punched, shoved, had her hair pulled and now been CHOKED by this kid. I'm LIVID. I've met with the school principal and the teacher at the same time. I've had an hour long phone conversation with the principal. The school is absolutely enabling this kid and his bad behavior. At 5 pm today I received an email that my daughter was absent today. My daughter was in school today. This kid pulled her hair today. The principal loves to boast about the great job he's doing and how his "approach" is so successful. Not so successful when kids in your care are repeatedly getting hurt. Principal is just as responsible as the child at this point for neglecting to take action or remove the other child so he stops targeting my daughter. If you want your child to be bullied and punched, learning words like "f you", flipped off and CHOKED send your baby here. Removing my daughter from this school immediately due to safety concerns. They don't even know who's in attendance? Unreal.

We moved our daughter from a charter school to William Walker. The teachers there are great. They show their love for the kids. As 2nd graders, not only do they have math, English, PE, etc., and the school also provides Music, Technology, and Library. Kids get to borrow two books every week, it has been only a month, and my daughter started to like reading a lot. Previously my daughter always struggled with Math, but now she is enjoying doing math work. We are very surprised to see what a big change happened to her. Her classroom teacher is very nice and experienced. We are so impressed after the first teacher-parent conference with her. This is probably the biggest decision that as parents we made to move our daughter to William Walker. Our daughter now is a happy 2nd grader.

What our family liked about this school: diversity in culture and ethnicity in the student body, and overall caring teachers and staff. As a parent of a SPED student, however, I absolutely had to advocate much more strongly than expected for my child's needs (much more than at other schools); and I have heard similar experiences from other parents in the community. My child's outside specialists had a conversation with various school staff at one point and told me they could discern that that members of the SPED team likely had not even read up on my child's condition. Additionally, I was less than thrilled with some of the very strong and sometimes pushy personalities of district staff and specialists that were assigned to the team. Overall I am recommending this school, as it may be an ideal school for families of typically developing children who naturally lean toward high achievement, but our experience was that it was not the best thing for our particular child.

ASA, What a Wonderful School!!! My Son has gotten a great education along with life lessons about being kind, helpful, accepting and being a good citizen in our community.

This review is not about their education but about their character based on our limited interaction. Our house is right across MSB and we got used to traffic during pick up/drop off times and people parking in our driveway. No biggy.. we understand as we have 7 yo ourself. Recently we started to have their garbage truck coming at 5.30am and standing on their property for 20-30min with loud music and engine running. It is summer time and our windows are open so it wakes us up. I shared my concern with their custodian and asked if he can contact garbage company to stop doing that. His response was - why dont you do it yourself…Maybe it is a good school but definitely not a nice neighbor. If someone tell this to me - i would be apologetic and try to fix it ASAP. I guess this might not be a representation on their staff and program but it definitely reflects on their HR and hiring practices

We have been involved with St Pius for a while. While the school started out great many years ago, it has not been good since we got new administration. It was a great place before. I felt it was much more co-creative and the teachers liked actually working there. The school is very cliquey and we've seen many turnovers of parents leaving. For the past few years, turnover has also been high for staff and morale seems to be very low. There are better private schools in the area with staff that cares about both the students and the parents.