Thoughts on Linder Academy?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Linder upper school is finishing the year as still a mess. The accreditation was pushed through by the former assistant principal but the accreditation team never came in person to inspect or visit the campus. The owner picked an accreditations agency that accepted videos, and the words of staff. Never came to see the students.

The same assistant principal was also promptly fired right. Why?

The School’s owner knew the assistant had an active open court case in NY State accusing her of child abuse, yet the owner hired her anyways during the last school year.

Soon after the accreditation went through this year, the assistant had an ‘oops I did it again moment’ making another poor decision with a child in the school’s custody during the day.

You can say the owner responded to an incident. But why did the owner even hire someone with an active accusation? The owner believes she can do no wrong.

Academics are middling. Nearly every kid doesn’t do their work or bother to study yet grades are padded to impress parents.

Yup. Don't believe the numbers.

[Anonymous]

This is just not our experience. Unlike a lot of private schools, Linder kids regularly get standardized testing. Our kid—who is a crummy test taker/-has continued to show improvement. There are definitely kids with a range of behavioral issues at Linder—that’s who the school is for! (And I say this as a parent of a kid who actually isn’t a behavioral issues, and deals with complaints from my kid about those who are.)
The head of school was very transparent when the upper school head was hired. And she wound up not being a good fit. The head of school is pushing the kids to have more responsibility and autonomy. Her focus is really on 2E kids, I think, but my no-E kid has really benefited from the challenges, both academic and social. And the new teachers have really been quite good. Folks on here worry about their kid not reading books, spending too much time on mindless “educational” apps-this is not that.
Let me also add—the school is all about getting kids ready for the next thing, whatever that is. In addition to field trips for the upper school to explore different careers, all the high school students spent a week tailored to their interests to immerse themselves in something they thought they might want to do. The kids got a TON out of this and the employers were pleased by the behavior and engagement of the kids. This school offers a lot. If you don’t need it, that’s great, but if you do , check it out.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Linder upper school is finishing the year as still a mess. The accreditation was pushed through by the former assistant principal but the accreditation team never came in person to inspect or visit the campus. The owner picked an accreditations agency that accepted videos, and the words of staff. Never came to see the students.

The same assistant principal was also promptly fired right. Why?

The School’s owner knew the assistant had an active open court case in NY State accusing her of child abuse, yet the owner hired her anyways during the last school year.

Soon after the accreditation went through this year, the assistant had an ‘oops I did it again moment’ making another poor decision with a child in the school’s custody during the day.

You can say the owner responded to an incident. But why did the owner even hire someone with an active accusation? The owner believes she can do no wrong.

Academics are middling. Nearly every kid doesn’t do their work or bother to study yet grades are padded to impress parents.

Source of information?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Linder upper school is finishing the year as still a mess. The accreditation was pushed through by the former assistant principal but the accreditation team never came in person to inspect or visit the campus. The owner picked an accreditations agency that accepted videos, and the words of staff. Never came to see the students.

Untrue.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Linder upper school is finishing the year as still a mess. The accreditation was pushed through by the former assistant principal but the accreditation team never came in person to inspect or visit the campus. The owner picked an accreditations agency that accepted videos, and the words of staff. Never came to see the students.

Untrue.

We are a current family and this is totally true!!! The now fired head of school (HOS) and curriculum director spent the entire accreditation review time in virtual meetings. Notes were posted on their doors during this time that kids had to stay away from the admin people (2j so the admin could focus on the accreditation meetings. The HOS ran around the school filming videos in the week before those meetings.

Not a soul from the accreditation agency ever stepped foot on campus, live during a school day.

Never got to see the classroom behavioral chaos, the fights, arguments and bullying.

The school has a partnership with an ABA group and regularly insists kids have their own individual babysitters to travel around with them all day. And even the ABA aides frequently do nothing to tamp down misbehaviors. So a kid melts down and instead of the kid being pulled out to calm down with the aid, the entire class teaching time is negatively affected. Never got seen.

Accreditation agencies never got to see that the science exams were based on a series of 40 questions per test, all year, where the kids were given the answers in the advance, told they could take notes to use during the test. So basically to succeed you copied all 40 questions and answers on a cheat sheet and you were allowed to bring it to the test. If you did this you succeeded. Any real Homework also vanished because the kids never did it and grades needed to be brought back up.

So yes, as a poster said too, school is a hot mess.

[Anonymous]

I suspect they help the kids take the standardized tests. My kid received surprisingly excellent scores and we were thrilled by the “progress”. But then after switching to another private we discovered our kid was significantly behind in reading/writing and math.

We felt so betrayed. We ended up having to get an outside tutor to help our kid catch up to where we thought they were.

[Anonymous]

Current family here. This is all fake news and very dramatic... For context, this post began the day after the school told an existing parent they were not eligible for scholarships at >50% off tuition. It almost seems like some sort of blackmail—I'll post bad things and only take them down if you give my kid scholarship money. No thank you. That's not the culture needed here.

Here are the facts:

1. Accreditation requires in-school visits during instructional time, for BOTH the accreditation agencies—MSA and VCPE. Both occurred in person.

2. The court case in NY was dismissed before the assistant principal began at the school. There were pending lawsuits, but a group of parents was consulted before she was hired. The head of school came to us and said that she seemed great, but had some pending legal issues that she was fully transparent about. The parent committee advised to hire anyway. Her first year was great, but after that there was an issue and she was immediately asked to leave (mid-year, even though it was inconvenient). The head of school stepped in immediately, took over all her duties, and it was handled quickly and appropriately.

3. The testing is absolutely real. They gave my child 3 different tests this year to confirm that they're not over-indexing on one: IOWAs, Acadience, and iReady. Her scores were kind of all over the place with iReady (but there's a bunch of controversy about iReady - that's another topic). Her scores lined up well between the IOWAs and Acadience testing. My daughter is still below grade level in some areas. I met with the school and they helped me come up with a plan for what to do over the summer to prevent summer slide. It was very helpful.

The school's been great for us. They are extremely communicative, make thoughtful plans for our child, and take action on what they say they're going to do. To the parents out there spewing vitriol on this board - if this school is not working for you, why are you still here? Stop complaining and go somewhere else.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I suspect they help the kids take the standardized tests. My kid received surprisingly excellent scores and we were thrilled by the “progress”. But then after switching to another private we discovered our kid was significantly behind in reading/writing and math.

We felt so betrayed. We ended up having to get an outside tutor to help our kid catch up to where we thought they were.

I was going to post this. Happened to my kid in a public school and another private school, Linder-esque, figured it out and we fixed it through heavy remediation over a couple of years.

Too bad about Linder. I've been watching it, hoping it succeeds in case I need to switch back to private.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I looked into it last year but it isn't an accredited school so no matter how good they look on paper, I won't consider it an option for my 2E child. If they won't publish information on their accreditation process and/or a timeline for when they will be accredited then I have to assume they are not a serious school.

It was a 3+ year process to get accredited but Linder is now officially accredited now through two different accreditation bodies:

* MSA-CESS is the Middle States Association Commissions on Elementary and Secondary Schools - this is a premier regional accrediting agency.
* VCPE is the Virginia Council for Private Education. This is the state-recognized authority for private schools in Virginia.

[Anonymous]

Another current family who has been extremely pleased with the school, the continual growth, and ongoing updates as well as the care and personalization shown to the students.

Outside of test scores, we can see the progress made through work samples in conjunction with the abilities demonstrated outside the classroom.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Current family here. This is all fake news and very dramatic... For context, this post began the day after the school told an existing parent they were not eligible for scholarships at >50% off tuition. It almost seems like some sort of blackmail—I'll post bad things and only take them down if you give my kid scholarship money. No thank you. That's not the culture needed here.

Here are the facts:

1. Accreditation requires in-school visits during instructional time, for BOTH the accreditation agencies—MSA and VCPE. Both occurred in person.

2. The court case in NY was dismissed before the assistant principal began at the school. There were pending lawsuits, but a group of parents was consulted before she was hired. The head of school came to us and said that she seemed great, but had some pending legal issues that she was fully transparent about. The parent committee advised to hire anyway. Her first year was great, but after that there was an issue and she was immediately asked to leave (mid-year, even though it was inconvenient). The head of school stepped in immediately, took over all her duties, and it was handled quickly and appropriately.

3. The testing is absolutely real. They gave my child 3 different tests this year to confirm that they're not over-indexing on one: IOWAs, Acadience, and iReady. Her scores were kind of all over the place with iReady (but there's a bunch of controversy about iReady - that's another topic). Her scores lined up well between the IOWAs and Acadience testing. My daughter is still below grade level in some areas. I met with the school and they helped me come up with a plan for what to do over the summer to prevent summer slide. It was very helpful.

The school's been great for us. They are extremely communicative, make thoughtful plans for our child, and take action on what they say they're going to do. To the parents out there spewing vitriol on this board - if this school is not working for you, why are you still here? Stop complaining and go somewhere else.

How would a family know this? Did they share that info with the community?

Our kid took the IOWA tests and the results came back with very high 80th+ percentiles (for grade level). A few months later at the new school they were very far behind in reading/writing/math. Below grade level.

The IOWA tests are high quality, normalized tests. The only explanation seems to be that they “helped” our kid when they were taking the test.

Our kid did make some progress but it wasn’t the miraculous turnaround that they claimed. It took 1:1 tutors (OG, then math) for almost two years to bring the kid up to grade level. We should have done that from the start. Linder felt like a wasted year and we felt betrayed.