Satori Charter School

This letter is to any parents who ever thought about sending their child to a charter school. Here is our story:

Our son was in the fourth grade when the administrators of the charter school he had attended for nearly 3 years compelled us to pull him out in the middle of school year. This school, Satori, advertised itself as providing individualized attention to intelligent and creative children. Along with that, our son is very energetic and curious. For two years, Satori addressed the challenges that invariably come with such a child, and he seemed to be doing fine. This past year, however, his school suddenly became unable or unwilling to work with us.

It was heart-wrenching for us to have to finally reach the conclusion that the administration lacked the dedication to educate our son. After many meetings with the administrators over a 3-4 month period, we hired a child advocate for academic tutoring, and to help him with classroom skills. We also had him screened for eye-tracking issues at an office Satori recommended, using a procedure not covered by insurance. Though he was improving, they told us that his progress was inadequate. We wanted time to explore alternatives before embracing the pharmacological path. The school administrators, however, pressed for medication, albeit continuously stating “Legally, we cannot tell you to drug your child.”

At their urging, we opted not to press for a 504 plan or an IEP. Nonetheless, the school insisted that his behavior was leading him towards expulsion, citing factors such as inattentiveness and speaking out of turn in class. He is not a violent child. He has never been aggressive towards people or even towards property. He had trouble listening to his teacher, but behaved well whenever another adult was in class -- and he always had good things to say about the educational professionals at his school. Nevertheless, it seemed to us that the more we worked to address their concerns, the faster the school moved to cite our son for alleged misbehavior. In the end, we felt it necessary to take him out of Satori before another minor incident resulted in his expulsion.

Now our child attends a new school. The teachers and administrators have fully embraced him as part of their community, and though he still faces the same issues, he is thriving there. He is a top reader, has a reputation among classmates and teachers alike for a phenomenal vocabulary, and does well in math (at Satori, they let him fall months behind in math homework without so much as a word to us). He participates avidly in after-school activities, and gets along well with all his teachers, classmates, and administrators. He has a 504 plan; and he does not take medication.

As parents, we took measures to remedy our son’s situation at school; naturally, those measures required a few months to bear fruit. We expected Satori to work with us during that time in support of a member of their community; but in that, our disappointment was total. Perhaps this owes something to the fact that Satori’s founder, Phyllis Gold, has recently stepped away from her decades of involvement with the school. Or, perhaps, the criticism that charter schools are ultimately indifferent to students who do not fit a narrow mold applies more generally than we had thought possible.