Clayton Elementary School

They are not trained or interested in meeting the needs of twice exceptional children. Not only do they fail to provide a Free and Appropriate Public Education (FAPE) under the Least Restrictive Environment (LRE) according to the Individuals with Disabilities in Education Act (IDEA), they will not follow IEPs.

Our daughter went to Mills for her KG in 2024. The school is great! The staffs are very helpful and kind. We are not sure about her classmates. They were just kids, they always made comments on skin color of our daughter. Someone told her that her skin color is brown as potty. Someone took her coat we never found her coat from the school. We didn't know what happened to her coat. That was one of her favorite coats. We complained about all to her class teacher but we didn't know she did anything or not. Our daughter likes to go to school very much from beginning of her school life. Last year she didn't want to go to school anymore. I stopped to mail her teacher anymore about these. Because I thought she might think I am "making complaint about everything type mom". We told our daughter to stay low not to react or what else we could do. Our daughter was so sad to hear comments about her skin color specially. She never experienced this before as we moved from different state. She didn't like that school much neither did we.Skin color comments are really horrible and that makes kid very uncomfortable. She always asked me at that time why aren't all have same skin color? We were in rent at that time we moved after her KG and bought a home in different area.We went for Mills seeing it's reviews as moved from different state but didn't workout for us or rather for our daughter. We don't want to let any other kids to experience this like our daughter.Thank you.

We found Baldwin to be very disappointing. The school culture is really toxic. The teachers are very nice, but I am almost positive that they are instructed by the administration to not communicate with the parents. Every time that I tried to talk to a teacher, they just refused to really tell me how my child was doing. One teacher even told my fourth grader’s class, “I don’t care if you don’t pay attention in math. Your parents can find out when your report cards come.” Report cards come every 9 weeks. There are no progress reports or communication to parents on how the kids are doing until those 9 weeks are up. That’s not a healthy learning environment. There are children that care about their grades, but my students didn’t have any interactions with kids that really wanted to learn. I believe my students learned something, but it was definitely not the focus of the students. The MAP scores in the fall never changed in the spring. Last, the students get to decide who gets in trouble at the school. Students tend to stick together if they live in the same neighborhood, but they tend to be ruthless to the newcomers.

PLEASE take heed before sending your children here. As a Waldorf alumni, we wanted Waldorf for our kids even though my education wasn’t perfect. We were there 8 yrs and saw a lot of really disturbing things, mostly stemming from the admin. While there, the head of school changed 4 times, each one worse than the next. With one of the new heads of school, we got an email describing him. I literally said to my spouse, “I don’t know anything about running a school but I’m willing to bet he only lasts 2 years.” It wasn’t rocket science, they put it in the email - he’d worked at Waldorf schools in three different states all around the country. Unfortunately I was right, he didn’t even last one year. No idea HOW they’re hiring who they are but it terrible. The teachers were pretty toxic too, not towards our kids so much thankfully but I saw terrible favoritism, labeling, and bullying from teachers toward students. There was a HUGE turn over in teachers, which says a lot. I saw SO MANY kids unable to read simple words in 3rd grade. I could go on and on about the things parents I met there shared with me. I heard of so many children there taking huge blows to their self esteem, falling WAY behind in all subjects. I heard of random racism, letting some kids arrive late daily while another family of a different nationality was asked to leave for being late way less often. One child we knew of sustained an injury in the morning, wasn’t attended to, then was let by the school to walk home after school. When the mom took him to the ER, he needed stitches. When the child went back to school, the PE teacher said to the child, “I TOLD you you’d need stitches.” She should’ve told an adult. Never did. Shameful.It is not the warm community you’d expect. Families are asked to clean the classrooms before the first day of school while other Waldorf schools host potlucks on campus to help families get to know each other. The parents are VERY cliquish. The school never offered any parent workshops. I did have friends I met there who had ok experiences with the school and academically but they were less than 50%. Just look at the class sizes… there’s a waitlist in kinder and the early grades, then very small classes in the upper grades and high school. People go there, hoping like we did, and wisely LEAVE.Austin Waldorf is a very sick place and gives Waldorf a bad name. PLEASE take heed before sending your children here.