Reply to St. Ann Catholic School or Cardinal Elementary

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]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. [/quote]

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.  [/quote]

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. 
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