This is a long review, so I'll sum it up here: Make sure the teacher you are assigned is good or risk the consequences.
We invested six years of our lives in this school, from preschool to third grade, and had every intention of staying there through high school, until the school refused to resolve what had become a big problem for half of our class--the teacher.
The biggest gamble with a Waldorf school is who your teacher is going to be, since the teacher you get in the first grade theoretically stays with your child through the eighth grade. This has some advantages in that the bond between your child and the teacher becomes much stronger. But it also depends on somebody who can teach eight different grades, as well as the ability of your school's administration to choose good people. If you get a great teacher who is capable of guiding your child for eight years, no problem. If you don't, you have a big problem.
We loved our teachers in pre-K and Kindergarten, and continued to love all of the ancilliary teachers for foreign language, arts, and dance. But the teacher we were assigned in first grade was new to Waldorf and neither ready or able to do the job. She often used a bare minimum of the resources required to make projects. She made strange threats to the class that were more harmful than helpful. She created competitions between members of the class that were not in keeping with the Waldorf philosophy. We expressed our concerns about these things and she seemed to understand what we were talking about and pledged to stop doing them, but she didn't. When we started to compare notes with other parents, we found out she had speaking badly about our children to others. (She had told us earlier that another child had been a problem and it turned out she had told that child's parents that our child had been a problem; then a new family was told all of our children were a problem, which helped explain why they had been so aloof for the first half of the year.)
We tried, we really did: Two years of this and we kept telling ourselves, "She's new," "She's overwhelmed," "If we're patient and helpful maybe she'll come around." She didn't.
This sentiment was shared by many of the parents in our class, and when the school hired a new pedagogical chair we made our case to him and he agreed there was definitely a problem. He tried to address it directly with the teacher, tried to have us all sit down and express our concerns, tried everything he could to fix it, all to no avail.
Less than half way into the third grade, almost half of the parents (I think we had 10 kids in the class total) had had enough. During a monthly meeting the pedagogical chair came and addressed his and our concerns. After that meeting we reached out to the teacher to ask her to respond and/or address some of the concerns and she refused, then the school told the parents that any further communications with her should go through them.
Let me repeat that: WE WERE TOLD THAT WE SHOULD NO LONGER TO COMMUNICATE DIRECTLY WITH OUR CHILD'S TEACHER.
Obviously, that's not a tenable situation. Four of the kids in our class (including us) decided to leave. Immediately. At least one more decided to stick it out for the year and then left. The pedagogical chair, who I believe had moved with his wife from Philadelphia to take this multi-year contract job, was fired. And that was that.
The aftermath was just sad. We were nothing but supportive of this school for six years, through every carnival, every fundraiser, everything you can think of. We presented a solid case of problems backed by an administrator and they chose the teacher over us. When the fact that half of her class had suddenly left rippled through the school, one of the families that remained spread a rumor that we were racist. As if four families who had stuck it out with this person for 2 1/2 years suddenly decided one day that they didn't like the color of her skin.
I've thought about writing this review many times since we left Highland Hall. I'm writing it now because I heard that when this incident recently came up with a prospective new family, the school told them they just had a bunch of difficult parents that year. (Folks, if somebody tells you half a class walked out right in the middle of the school year because the parents were being difficult, I'd double-down on vetting that teacher.)
Now we've heard that the teacher in question has not been asked to return to the school. Had they only made that decision years ago when we presented them with a list of serious concerns and a mountain of examples we might still be there, although I'm not sure how much I could have trusted the administration after that.
In short: if you're going to go to a school like this, make 100% sure you have faith in your teacher and the competence of your administration. I'm hoping this review will keep some people from having to learn this the hard way. read more