Worst school ever, in my opinion! We have been attending for 5 years, since our daughter was 18 months old. She still cannot count to 20 in Spanish. They put more emphasis on Chinese. She kept repeating the Spanish curriculum over and over, year after year, counting and colors. She never got beyond that in Spanish. Then they discontinued Spanish in Kindergarten and offered it only two days a week for an hour, optionally. Her English teacher was mean and would yell at the kids.
Also, at the end of the year in preschool, she was learning to "smush" letters in her English class. When she started again in the Fall for Kindergarten, they expected her to read 50 wpm, without teaching her to read. They told us to buy the books and have her read at home. We spent $1,000 on those reading books and had to catch her up. Finally, by the end of the kindergarten year, we're caught up, with hundreds of hours of homeschooling to catch her up. The English teacher quit teaching her English class mid-year and they had to have a new teacher come in and re-assess the students and start all over again.
Their homework is intense. Parents are refusing playdates on the weekends because they have to study for assessments or spelling tests or do homework. They do spelling tests every week. They do "assessments" all the time to help the school look good. The pressure on the little kids is terrible. If you don't do the optional homework, your student will be getting C's or D's, because although it's optional, they do matter, but they don't tell you until it's too late. If you want a homeschooling program, this is it, because Parents end up doing TONS of the work at home with your child. The parents are getting tutors in preschool & kindergarten to keep up.
And although you're paying an exorbitant amount for tuition, their PTO is always raising money for the school and they expect parents to help build their new playground in their new building, and the school expects the parents to do a LOT of the teaching and get extra tutors to keep up with their "advanced" program. It's a lot of extra money for the gala, fundraisers, all the special dress-up days, etc.
A lot of the teachers have left the school to go teach at the better school across the street. And now another trilingual school has moved down the street, which is also a better trilingual program. Lots of parents are leaving too. The classes get smaller and smaller as the years go on so that by 6th grade, only 4 students are left in the classes. They extended the school to HS, but then there's only 2-4 students in those classes and they make them go to the community college to get their classes. And when the students leave RSI and go to another school, they're 2 years BEHIND in math because they learned it in Mandarin, and not English, so they have to catch up at other schools.
They are a CLOSED school and they don't let parents on campus. They lock the doors and they have the security guard follow you around so you feel uncomfortable if you get out of your car to escort your preschool student to class.
They don't return calls quickly, or emails. It's really hard to get a parent-teacher conference scheduled. Their online portal is rarely updated with assignments or teacher comments or their calendar, then they tell you to go online to get the information, but the information is never current and it's not consistent amongst the different teachers.
Two families got kicked out of school for requesting that their kids be protected from violence and bullying, while the bullies are being promoted with pictures on their social media pages, and the school refused to help protect the innocent kids. They, instead, criminalized the victims. read more