Pinewood Preparatory School

Principal is very fake. I don’t believe she genuinely cares about the children. The teachers are hit or miss, some great, a lot not so great. Front office staff is rude. My 2nd grader missed his bus home one afternoon , and they blamed him for not being where he was supposed to be, when the real issue was a teacher not calling out his bus number. Front staff was extremely rude about it. Another time, my son was sent to the library to learn “virtually” all day because he took his mask off when he couldn’t breathe. The pandemic has shown the true colors of the school, and sadly, they’re lacking. I asked for physical worksheets to be sent home for my 2nd grader (who spent most of 1st grade virtual) so he could physically work on his handwriting. The teacher’s response was that they don’t do that. So I had to order my own worksheets. They rely way too much on technology to teach kids, rather than building fine motor coordination with pencils, paper, glue, and scissors. Overall they’re going downhill from where they were a few years ago when my children first attended KES (2019).

Everyone talks about Reeves Elementary but the administrators here are a joke. The adults at this school are very cliquey because of the principals. Racism from the principals and there is not a lot of diversity here. The principal plays nice at first but you will slowly see her true colors as time goes on. Communication is not the best either. Things get swept under the rug and some teachers are not supported 100%. This school is not the best for minorities.

In our experience, the culture is one of high entitlement and low accountability. Academically, we understood the school to be “a year ahead” yet we did not find this to be the case, because as a new student, our older child had seen the first half of the year’s math work in our previous public school. We spent hours each night with our younger child “studying”/memorizing countless information on worksheets, etc. which took up a lot of family time in the evenings. The handbook related to bullying was not upheld in our older child’s experience where an individual (one bully)/bullying scenario progressed to a group social/verbal bullying environment for my child. The school has the final say in what happened/your experience, and in our case, we never met (in person or over the phone) with the very top school administration, yet we were shockingly told that our claims of bullying were suddenly and shockingly deemed “unfounded" when we asked for tuition reimbursement. This was a very disappointing and expensive endeavor. Our children are once again thriving now that we have pulled them from this haughty and elitist (albeit majority middle-class families) school environment.