Our daughter was disenrolled from Silverwood School by the Head of School, Lisa Heaman, in March 2022 after we filed a formal complaint regarding child safety and Lisa's inability to take care of the situation. We shared with the school no less than 4 times that children were going to an area where teachers could not see them and asking each other to see their private parts. Additionally, there were several instances of children getting hurt without proper supervision. When we contacted the Board of Education they informed us we needed to send a complaint to the school in writing to kick off the process. Lisa responded asking us to unenroll our child and we responded telling her we would not be doing this and we expected her to fix the problem. The next day we received an email from Lisa saying we are being disenrolled. The school attorney forgot to remove us from her response back (attached) and clearly they knew already they were retaliating. We have heard from multiple parents that share the same sentiment about Lisa and I will refrain from sharing those details due to her retaliatory nature. Several parents (including myself) began to write reviews on Facebook, but Lisa removed the ability to leave a review on Facebook immediately. Additionally, all the comments about how she's lied to parents' faces and other issues has been removed.
Towards the beginning of the school year, Lisa invited me to meet with her and Ryan Marriott, President of the Board, to discuss their diversity initiatives. I expressed concerns about the lack of diversity in the student body and since this is something I specialize in, I was hoping to help them. During this meeting, they told me up until 2021 they had nearly a 100% reenrollment rate. However, there were several parents that chose not to reenroll (this is also the same time Lisa joined the school). They referred to those parents as "toxic" which was a bit of a red flag for me, especially since I was just meeting them and this wasn't useful context of the conversation.
In addition to the challenges we had with Lisa, the teacher turnover is non-stop. Our daughter's teacher was a Silverwood Alumni and has been there for 9 years. Is was a huge selling point that Lisa leveraged with prospective parents. She is now leaving the school, which is such a loss. There has been so much turnover that Lisa herself has been teaching classes b/c the school is unable to retain teachers. There have been other teachers that have left with even longer tenure at the school. Most of us parents have a good idea of why they are leaving.
To date, we've filed a formal complaint with the state and Lisa hasn't responded to that complaint as of last week. We don't anticipate she will respond, but prospective parents can request access to the complaint if you would like more information on all the details of what transpired with our child. We filed another complaint with the HRC through our attorney and it will take some time for the formal investigation to begin. However, in the interim, we hope we can share our experience since so many parents' comments and reviews have been removed from Facebook. I wish I had known what other parents went through prior to deciding to enroll our child here. I also wish I had done more research on Lisa Heaman prior to enrolling at this school. There's plenty of information from her previous school that I completely missed. I hope this helps other prospective parents make a more informed decision since reviews have been removed. read more