Skyline Elementary

Best elementary school here but the principal is not very good at her job however everything else is amazing

While there are some great teachers at Linwood, there are others, along with admin; who do not have what is in the best interest of student's first, but what is easiest for them. Hopefully new principal next year will do better. For example, we have found IEP meetings to be extremely difficult to schedule and they wait until the last minute (right before their deadline) to schedule the IEP meeting, even when I have tried to schedule the meetings well in advance to avoid scheduling conflicts. Additionally, when I have asked questions during the IEP meetings, my questions were often met with annoyance and condenscending attitudes. I had to make several requests for IEP progress notes, which should given with every report card. IEP Meetings were only scheduled for 20-30 minutes, so meetings were rushed.We had major concerns about our student's math skills because they had deep difficulty with basic multiplication and division (upper grade student), the homework would cause overwhelm. We requested more support for math from the IEP team and we were shown "data" that our child was performing ok. When the IEP psychological evaluation results came back, our student scored in the FIRST percentile for math for their age and grade. We asked the IEP team about this discrepancy and they blamed our student for being a bad test taker. Our student also experienced harassment, intimidation and bullying. Students at Linwood are expected to report "conflict" immediately, even in front of their bully. Our student experienced major bullying over the years at this school. More recently, one of the last events was reported to me directly after school, so I was able to report it to the teacher the same day. The plan was for a restorative conversation, however it took several days for it occur and then my student was bullied horribly again. This time it was reported before dismissal, the day it occurred, when they felt safe to do so. My student requested cameras be checked and his friend to be interviewed since he witnessed everything. Bullies denied it, recess staff didn't notice anything, so case closed. They never checked the cameras or interviewed the friend (confirmed by friend). The admin blamed my student for not reporting it immediately in front of the bullies (victim blaming). We had to get the district involved after Linwood admin stonewalling and giving poor excuses for not investigating thoroughly. We had no choice but to pull him from Linwood.

While the PTA is very strong at this school the focus is academia only, the concept of teaching a love of learning, active play, and even recess is once a day for all grades. Zero elements are in place to support children with bullying and working through problems since the efforts are mostly test scores and meeting standards. Each kid hated school severely after attending and won't go back. Several parents I've talked to have had similar experiences. The admin needs to change before this school can thrive.

Where do I start? The school principal, (Lisa Henderson) and the rest of her staff look the other way when children are being bullied. Children experience extreme torment, abuse and harassment at this school and nothing is ever done to protect our children. During my child’s experience at this school there was a class bully. He was awful to my child and all the other children in the class. He threatened to shoot children, crawled under the bathroom stalls and assaulted and harassed children while they were using the bathroom, beat kids with hard objects leaving marks on their bodies during recess, pushed kids to the ground, shoved kids from the top of the big play toys resulting in injury, spit on kids, kicked kids, pulled their hair… all of the above! And what did the staff do to protect my child and your children during all of this? They looked the other way. They kept him in the classroom to continue the torment and even told students that they weren’t allowed to tell on the bully anymore because the teacher was “tired of kids trying to get him in trouble”. So when kids were assaulted and threatened over and over again, they never had a safe person to go to when they felt scared or needed help. They were forced to take the abuse. If the children were being properly supervised, I do not believe most of these occurrences of abuse would have happened but then again, they never punished the bullying anyways, leading the bully to believe he could get away with anything. This left my student and many others in the class with extreme PTSD. I can’t begin to explain how bad it was. My child will not be returning next year due to the lack of safety and protection at this school. Many other parents have expressed to me that they will also be finding another school next year. It is very unfortunate that the staff turned out to be so negligent and never had children’s best interest. How did they expect kids to learn while feeling so hopeless everyday? Kids weren’t learning. I hope the district decides to do something about this so that future children do not experience the same torment by others and lack of safety at the school.

We greatly enjoyed our 4 years at North Wall Schools and would strongly recommend the school to others in our area. We were blessed with wonderful opportunities and built many lifelong relationships. We always felt that our child was safe and loved. This school is truly one in a million.