My son attended EFB in the 2021 school year. He had previously attended a French-language…read morepreschool in Lexington, but that school closed as a consequence of the pandemic. After a year of no school, my wife and I enrolled him at EFB, in the hope we could pick up where we had left off.
Biggest mistake of my life - and one which had real consequences for my son.
As far as I ever learned, his teacher, whom I had met previously when she worked with animals at Massachusetts Veterinary Referral Hospital in Woburn, had had no prior experience working with children. Her primary job qualification appeared to be that she was a native French speaker. She was extremely ill-equipped to work with young children, never mind a child such as my son who had been out of school for a year and who had spent that year largely secluded with his parents. And she was not alone: while there were a handful of people at the school who took their responsibilities seriously (I shall always be indebted in particular to Isabelle Ward), too many were unwilling, or unable, to respond to the singular demands of either that particular moment in history - the reopening of the world following a pandemic - or of their students. I was astounded, for example, during a video orientation with the school counselor prior to the start of the school year, that no thought had been given to how this rentrée, after the entire world had been closed for more than a year, was going to be different from any other. No thought was given to how to accommodate students whose whole worlds had been turned upside down when they were still learning to walk, and who were now trying to get their sea legs on a ship - the world! - still in the process of righting itself. When my son started to shut down in this environment of sheer thoughtlessness, he was treated as a problem, with little or no attempt to understand where he was coming from, or what the school should undertake to try to help him (again, there were one or two exceptions, including Isabelle Ward, whom I once again acknowledge and thank). At one point, his teacher noted, in a conference with my wife and me, that my son said he hated school, something that she seemed to think made him some kind of school shooter in the bud. Any time a "teacher" makes such a suggestion about a 4 (!) year old who weighed all of 40 lbs soaking wet, it says something about her and the school she represents, and nothing at all about the kid.
To be fair: no one had any experience navigating a rentrée like 2021. Instead of recognizing this massively obvious fact, however, EFB just wanted to go on as if nothing had happened. I understand this desire; I even succumbed to it myself when I enrolled my son at EFB, as if it could be an adequate substitute for the school where he had thrived prior to the pandemic and which no longer existed. Succumbing to this desire, however, had real consequences for my son - consequences for which I hold myself responsible first of all, but also EFB, for its unwillingness or inability to adapt in the least way when those consequences began to emerge.
My wife and I pulled my son out of EFB when we realized how harmful it was for him. But the months he spent there left scars that will last a lifetime.
I have waited 5 years to write this review, and do so now only because my son disclosed last night, for the first time, how harshly he was once disparaged at EFB for taking an empty toilet paper roll out of the bathroom. Suddenly, I understood something that had happened at EFB and had hitherto been a mystery: my son, who has been toilet trained since the age of 2, suddenly stopped using the bathroom at EFB, to the point of repeatedly peeing his pants at school, at the end of the day when he could no longer hold it in anymore. I had never understood why - until he recounted this story.
I can't think of a more damning anecdote about this school.
