We, like the other reviewer, wanted nothing more than to love this school. However, after one month of our kindergartener's cries about being hurt and then witnessing it myself when I was told by my 5 year old to "come protect" him on the playground; we removed him from the Wimberley public school system. I hope ours was an isolated experience and that bullying isn't as prevalent and normalized as it seems at this school; but when your five year old is punched in the face on the second day of school and it only goes downhill from there, you have to wonder.
Prior to removing our son from school we did seek help from the faculty and while they responded with ideas to help our son like, letting him go to another room rather than the playground, we felt their inability to acknowledge and rectify the actual problem was unacceptable. We left the meeting feeling like our family was the problem and our expectations of safety and supervision were not attainable without isolating our son from the rest of the students in the school.
One of the reasons we moved to Wimberley were the school reviews and the student/teacher ratio being 15 to 1. My son's kinder class had 20 students to 1 this year. Multiple school staff members told me that they had too many kids to watch them all, all the time, including when sending them down the hall where there could be 4-5 of them unattended in the bathroom at one time. When asked about a rover TA or hall monitor I was told they didn't do that; but my son could be taken to the nurse to use the bathroom separately if that's what he needed so he wasn't afraid to go to the bathroom (he was hit there among other incidents).
I'm happy to say that after 2 days in a school with "nice kids who don't hit me" my son is starting be okay with going school again. As it turns out, and contrary to what the individuals working at Scudder believe, it's not an unrealistic expectation for kids to be monitored closely or to think that hitting, punching, and shoving others to the ground repeatedly shouldn't be normalized.
Beware of this school and please listen to your kids if they go to Scudder and tell you they are experiencing bullying. I would have kept believing it wasn't as bad as my kid was saying (what we were told by a teacher) if I hadn't sat in the parking lot, watched him be hurt and then had to stop it myself because no one was paying attention to him. read more