St. Ann Catholic School or Cardinal Elementary

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:People have mixed feelings about the principal, but most of the teachers are wonderful at Cardinal. To me the biggest difference is the sheer size. St Ann is small. That works if your kid finds a friend group, but a lot harder if they don't fit in because there aren't a ton of kids. Because it's small it also doesn't have a lot of differentiation so if you have a child who needs extra supports or is advanced, you may not get the same types of extensions that public school in theory offers.

That's exactly the issue with Cardinal's principal, theory vs. practice. He's terrific if you're just a regular kid looking for a fine education. He does a terrific job in recruiting teachers; that as well as guiding the school through two renovations and a move represent his greatest achievements (and they're substantial to be sure). Cardinal used to be McKinley, but moved and renamed itself when they vacated the building so ATS could go in there (post-renovation, natch).

But woe is the kid who needs special services of any kind, on any end of the spectrum. And especially woe is the parent who asks questions about whether such services are being well-delivered. See, he'll tell you he's an open guy, he'll tell you he listens, he'll tell you he gets it, as he shuts down your question in the PTA meeting and responds at the legal bare minimum to your request that the IEP be established, be followed, etc. St. Ann's won't provide the differentiation that you're entitled to in theory in public school, but they'll tell you they won't provide it.

I'm not this poster but I could have written it. I know a couple of non-SN kids who transferred to St. Ann from Cardinal b/c of this dude. Anyway, while this dude was saying my child was "on grade level" and their particular disability didn't exist, I transferred, along with about 6 other families. Turns out my child was 2 grades behind. So yes, if your child has SN, I think the administration is not going to be supportive. The teachers are great and they fought for my kid but usually lost. It's a brand new physical plant though so looks pretty....The AP is not much better. She doesn't have a dark soul but she doesnt stand up for what's right.

Both of these posters are spot on. If you have an average kid Cardinal is fine.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I know nothing about Cardinal, but St. Ann has a new principal as of last year who is causing real problems. Total lack of communication and dismissive attitude towards parents, classroom behavior issues, and greatly increased employee turnover to the point they’re struggling to fill basic positions. We were really happy with how our DD was doing there at the beginning of the year (especially after COVID), but by the end of the year we transferred back to APS.

I'm hearing the opposite about St. Ann's...that families are happy with the direction of the school and the new principal. The school has waiting lists at many grades.

I’m the PP who transferred out. I didn’t intend to get into the details on here, but here goes.

The problems were localized to a few specific grades. If you had a good teacher and a class of good kids I don’t see why you’d be unhappy. In our case we had a class with a number of disruptive kids and behaviors about which nothing was done. My kid’s teacher was out for almost a month straight with no formal communication from the administration what was going on and what they were going to do about it. No permanent sub, just a rotating series of whichever specials teacher had time that day. Lesson plans basically stopped or were only haphazardly followed, and the kids did a TON of free drawing. Once parents found out just how long this had been going on the admin scrambled and tried to pass off a college student (non Ed major) as a permanent sub. That didn’t fly for obvious reasons. The whole time the principal just had this kind of La-dee-da attitude that everything was fine and under control, and was sort of surprised people wanted to be informed when a teacher has been out for a month. His opinion seemed to be that as long as the spiritual side was being attended to, then everything else would just work itself out. I’m sympathetic to that perspective (being Catholic and all), but Catholic school is still, in fact, a school. it’s not good for kids to go a whole month without knowing who their teacher will be every day, and for all their normal routines of learning to be subject to whatever the specials teacher felt capable of that day. And it’s difficult to feel the love about the whole “community of faith” thing when you can’t trust the admin to level with you.

My kid watched a lot of movies too. Basically every day during lunch, and sometimes at other times. I was never crazy about that either. Eating in the classroom was a COVID thing, but watching screens while you eat is a terrible habit to inculcate, and I got the impression it was just for classroom management. I never complained about this but it still bothered me.

Personally I would have walked over broken glass for that school at the beginning of the year, because they actually managed to stay open during COVID and my kid was entering kindergarten and I knew she wouldn’t do well with virtual school. But in the course of that second year they used up all of that goodwill. I wanted to stay and just hold out hope that next year would be better but I couldn’t sell my DH on it. Since the end of the school year we heard that a number of the teachers we really liked were also leaving (turnover is turnover, It happens, I know) and now I’m less sure we would have been happy if we stayed.

[Anonymous]

I'm sorry, PP.

By contrast, you almost never see job openings at Cardinal. Those positions are filled very quickly.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I know nothing about Cardinal, but St. Ann has a new principal as of last year who is causing real problems. Total lack of communication and dismissive attitude towards parents, classroom behavior issues, and greatly increased employee turnover to the point they’re struggling to fill basic positions. We were really happy with how our DD was doing there at the beginning of the year (especially after COVID), but by the end of the year we transferred back to APS.

I'm hearing the opposite about St. Ann's...that families are happy with the direction of the school and the new principal. The school has waiting lists at many grades.

I’m the PP who transferred out. I didn’t intend to get into the details on here, but here goes.

The problems were localized to a few specific grades. If you had a good teacher and a class of good kids I don’t see why you’d be unhappy. In our case we had a class with a number of disruptive kids and behaviors about which nothing was done. My kid’s teacher was out for almost a month straight with no formal communication from the administration what was going on and what they were going to do about it. No permanent sub, just a rotating series of whichever specials teacher had time that day. Lesson plans basically stopped or were only haphazardly followed, and the kids did a TON of free drawing. Once parents found out just how long this had been going on the admin scrambled and tried to pass off a college student (non Ed major) as a permanent sub. That didn’t fly for obvious reasons. The whole time the principal just had this kind of La-dee-da attitude that everything was fine and under control, and was sort of surprised people wanted to be informed when a teacher has been out for a month. His opinion seemed to be that as long as the spiritual side was being attended to, then everything else would just work itself out. I’m sympathetic to that perspective (being Catholic and all), but Catholic school is still, in fact, a school. it’s not good for kids to go a whole month without knowing who their teacher will be every day, and for all their normal routines of learning to be subject to whatever the specials teacher felt capable of that day. And it’s difficult to feel the love about the whole “community of faith” thing when you can’t trust the admin to level with you.

My kid watched a lot of movies too. Basically every day during lunch, and sometimes at other times. I was never crazy about that either. Eating in the classroom was a COVID thing, but watching screens while you eat is a terrible habit to inculcate, and I got the impression it was just for classroom management. I never complained about this but it still bothered me.

Personally I would have walked over broken glass for that school at the beginning of the year, because they actually managed to stay open during COVID and my kid was entering kindergarten and I knew she wouldn’t do well with virtual school. But in the course of that second year they used up all of that goodwill. I wanted to stay and just hold out hope that next year would be better but I couldn’t sell my DH on it. Since the end of the school year we heard that a number of the teachers we really liked were also leaving (turnover is turnover, It happens, I know) and now I’m less sure we would have been happy if we stayed.

Are you me? You might be me. We were right there with you through that whole shitshow. I still feel like I was gaslit from start to finish, and it's good to read even an anonymous random internet account that matches our experience. What a disaster. We're going back to public this year too.