May Sands Montessori School

The kinder teacher here is a nightmare. She runs the class like boot camp. I feel so bad for the little ones in her class. My child went from loving school to hating it and having to drag my child to school with this teacher. It doesn’t make any sense why a teacher like this would be working with small children. She needs to be with high schoolers not little ones. She is scary. I would not recommend putting a child here with her.

awful, just terrible. there are countless others with the same experience as my family. this is not a Montessori school. This is a public school using the Montessori name. teachers are on their phones all day while ignoring the kids. Kids come out of the school having learned basically nothing. The teachers refused to address bullying and some of the teachers are bullies themselves. The middle school girls are starving themselves as a sort of competition and the school refuses to address that as well. My child knows the teacher won't offer help when asked but my child knows exactly what the teachers phone case looks like because the teacher is too busy on her phone all day. The way the teachers treat the kids here is appalling. I wonder if anyone even like children here. Mine left scarred and thinking all schools are this way. It has taken work to get them excited about learning again. I would absolutely never recommend this school to anyone, unless you want your child coming out years behind and emotionally scarred.

May Sands Montessori School is a free Public Charter School. It sounds as though the reviewer of April 2012 may have confused it with the private Montessori Children's School down the street.

We heard rave reviews so we thought we'd give it a shot. Our daughter is very laid back and we thought she'd do great in this environment. Unfortunately, the school is too laid back. Class begins at 8:30am, but if you arrive late at maybe 8:40 or so, you'll see parents still in the classroom. Children going in and out of the classes. No lesson to be started at all. They didn't make our daughter do much of the scholastic part. Our daughter was tested at her new school this week and didn't do well at all with writing. They don't tell them it's time to write, or even color for that matter, so our daughter spends most of her time doing,...dishes??? I've been told she does a lot of life skills. Like pretend ironing. Hmmm. I do like the lessons, however, their comes a point where the kindergarteners need to sit down and do some type of mandatory writing. Children these days are overexposed to computers/tablets, but the kindergarteners should be somewhat prepared to deal with other peers when they move to 1st grade. Also, my daughter has come home plenty of times with an almost full lunch box. As soon as we get in the car, she goes right for it. We've talked to the teachers, but they say they can't make the child eat. So she skips lunch and goes right to the playground. It's almost impossible to get into the charter school because they only had 7 or 9 openings for 1st grade and there's at least double that in the children's school. This doesn't include children from other schools who would like to attend. Something very important I noticed is during the enrichment classes, they've left the front door open more than once. So if they're in the front playground, they can easily take off into the street. Not good. Parking is difficult if you'd like to walk your child in as this is in a residential neighborhood. A lot of parents park in the loading zone. Also, they are the most expensive school down here and prices keep going up. Instead of prices going up, they should do more fundraising in the community. There are plenty of events in Key West that they can attend and make plenty of money. Definitely did not live up to all the hype we heard before enrolling.