Haven Montessori Children's House

Our daughter started at Haven when she was 14 months and we quickly realized what a perfect fit it was for our family. The faculty and staff have been so supportive and responsive and our daughter has thrived in the Montessori environment. The Haven staff make children the number one priority and it shows in everything they do. Leaving your young child somewhere five days a week is not an easy decision, but Haven has been a perfect fit and our daughter is genuinely excited to go every day. She has learned so much and I know that her foundation before she starts kindergarten is leaps and bounds ahead of so many other kids her age. We will forever be grateful for our time at Haven Montessori.

What an absolute nightmare.

My daughter started off great here during summer school, she loved her teacher and the other kids. Unfortunately her regular teacher (Shea) was a big problem from the beginning. We got daily reports of Shea being "mean" to our daughter, though I mostly minimized them to "over-sensitivity" by my kid. Step mom also had bad experiences with Shea's confrontational attitude. She seemed ok to me, but the girls both had a big problem with her.

Academically this place was also terrible in our experience. I took my daughter to this school for the precise reason that she could get more individual attention to her academic needs, but she did not. She never talked about what she learned at school, she just talked about her teacher yelling at her, and kids picking on her. The most she learned during second grade was what I taught her form workbooks on our off-time.

What was the last straw for me was the way they dealt with my kid being bullied. Their reports to me were that she was "hiding behind the bushes" during recess, and lashing out at other kids and some of the teachers. Well to me that means she is afraid at school, but the school persisted in asking me if she was being mistreated at home by stepmom. She does not behave this way at home, and has nothing bad to say about stepmom. But when she got home should would always, as in almost every day,  complain about people being mean to her at school Unfortunately I was excessively dismissive of her concerns, again figuring she just needed to learn to deal with other people and shouldn't be so sensitive. This self-acceptance of guilt was promoted by the staff who had a couple of special conferences with me, and explained how inappropriate my daughter was, how strange her behavior, and had all kinds of suggestions for how I could help her at home.

Well after my laggard intuition caught up and I ended up removing her from this school I took my daughter to her counsellor in Phoenix (whom she has known for a while), and sure enough, it came out that my daughter was being bullied psychologically and that's why she spent recess hiding in the trees. It's bad enough to be bullied in second grade (it happens), and worse for it to go undetected (staff are busy, ok...) but it is absolutely unacceptable as a parent to be gaslighted about it.

After removing her a few months from the end of the year to finish in a public school, she is finally coming home and telling me about what she learned, and how much fun it is. She says her teacher is really nice, and the other kids are usually nice to her - and when they aren't it's not the big deal it used to be, more like, "eh, so-and-so threw my backpack. He's a bad kid, ha ha" kind of stuff :-)

It's easy to say that one kid's bad experience at a school can be chalked up to being a poor fit and that it will be different for mine, but that does not explain the overt effort to marginalize a child for the school's own failings, nor to gaslight the parent over what's really happening.

This school is a very sick place, in my opinion. I hope it goes out of business.

My kids love going to school here.  The school works with my kids to make sure their needs are met and they are able to achieve their full potential.

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