As of this morning, I'm pulling my 6th Grader from Imagine School at Town Center!…read more
The folks at the school are incredibly nice, and very helpful when you walk in requiring assistance of one kind or another. You're always greeted with a smile and assured everything will be taken care of. The problem? They don't follow through!
My youngest son has always been an A student. Not to suggest he's perfect. He isn't. His A's have been hard won, and it's required a balance of teaching, parenting and great communication, which we've always had with his teachers. When he would start to slack off or not hand in homework, I made sure teachers knew that I was there, ready to respond.
We recently received an email from his Math Teacher saying he was missing 9 assignments. (FIRST QUESTION: Why did it take getting to 9 before anyone contacted me?) I immediately contact the teacher by email requesting a list of the missing assignments and a meeting. To date, I haven't heard back.
A little back story: My son started the year at a different school and was on the waiting list at Imagine. I guess they expected him to know their rules even though he wasn't there for orientation. As it turns out, the math teacher sends home a list of the weeks assignments every Monday for parents to sign, which was the reason we were supposed to know our boy was missing homework. The problem is that we didn't know she did this, and had NEVER sign one. You'd think that would be enough of a reason to email us and let us know something was wrong.
My wife and I called to talk with the school about the situation and finally got a response from Kristy, the school's Assistant Principal. She explained that Imagine has a 24 hour contact policy, and that we should have received a call or email within 24 hours. Very sorry about the entire mess, she promised to look into the issue, have a meeting with everyone in the department and get back to us with the specifics of on my son's issue(s). That was well over a week ago and I haven't heard back from her either.
My son recently came home with his progress reports, which contained several C's, two F's and a D. We signed and returned the progress reports with a request for a meeting with the teachers in each class. We still haven't heard from a single one.
If you're looking for a great school that will educate your kids and communicate with you, this place isn't it. "Charter School" may sound nice, but going from an A student to a D student in just a few months and being ignored through it all...
Enough is enough.
We have many friends that teach in the Flagler County School system and when we told them we were moving our son to Imagine, every single one of them told us to be very careful. Some even described this exact situation. I should have listened. I didn't, and now my son is paying for it.
I'm moving him back to Bunnell Elementary this morning.
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UPDATE:
After enrolling my son at his new school, I returned to Imagine to let them know and make sure my son didn't owe them anything.
I ended up meeting with Kristi Kendall and having a good talk. While there were attempts made to contact us, she agrees that we should have been called and that there is definitely a problem, even if only this time.
There's a lot to this issue, and my review of one start still stands, but I couldn't walk away without doing everything I could to make them fully aware of the situation. No child or parent should have experiences like this. Particularly when they're so involved. I wish them luck and hope they fix this, and quick!