El Rio Community

WARNING: This place is a cult. It is filled with families of privilege. Extremely white or white presenting people. The kids are ones who would normally need an IEP and parents who don't want to deal with the IEP process. It attracts violent children who whine about everything. The teachers who get fired without any notice to the families. Then when asked why a teacher is dismissed the school tells lies upon lies. There is zero curriculum so when the students test they are well below grade level. Stay away. There is zero learning happening and only wild inept staff. It is nothing like a Waldorf school except that they set up their classrooms with wooden toys. They do a winter fire lighting ceremony where kids grades TK through 8th are allowed to light candles on fire. These candles are surrounded by greenery inside of a building! It is a fire hazard. My friends son left campus twice and was wandering around the 5 freeway alone. The school had no idea.

This is the worst school my family has ever experienced. The turn over in teachers & student’s is non stop. Children have walked off campus alone. The school didn’t even notice. It sits along side the 5 freeway entrance and exit ramps. Their gate is open to allow the high school to come and go. The kids walk to a park 20 minutes away sidestepping buses, cars, and the freeway. There is zero structure to the school day. Academics are non existent. It attracts kids with severe behavioral problems creating dangerous situations in the classrooms such as punching, fighting, attacks on students & teachers. A first grade teacher was recently fired for misconduct in class. The school sent a cryptic email telling parents their students were safe. Lying and saying it was because he wasn’t credentialed. They say they are a nature school, yet they have no outdoor space except a parking lot they filled with wood chips & tree stumps. Everything they promote is a lie. Stay away this place is a mess.

It’s hard to write a review of a school that had its inaugural year smack dab in the middle of a pandemic, which is why I’m giving it three stars instead of the two that I would be inclined to give it under less extraordinary circumstances.

I’ll start with some positives, the staff and parent community at the school are lovely and kind, and the student body makeup seems to have a good mix of race and socioeconomic backgrounds. The school is lottery-based, so their student body’s diversity depends on who they target via marketing efforts.

The first red flag I had with the school was attending a parent education night, and the person leading the meeting mentioned that the 3rd-grade class spends the year studying stories from the Old Testament, starting with the “myth” of Cain and Able. Another mother and I did a triple take, we asked, “How is this possible in a public school?” The reply was that they teach these stories a “myths” and not as biblical stories.

Around the same time, there was a rumble amongst the parents because some of the children in the older grades were told not to use black and brown crayons because they “weren’t as pretty” as the other colors of crayons. In the midst of all that was happening in the world, this felt extremely inappropriate and off-base. That was my second red flag.

This prompted me to do some deeper research into the origins of Waldorf because I had come into this school thinking this was a play-based, child-centered approach that didn’t stress hard academics in Kindergarten and taught reading when it was developmentally appropriate, etc.

The origins of Waldorf are laden with “spiritual”, religious and racist undertones and the founder of Waldorf, Rudolf Steiner, was simply put a religious kook and a racist.

This article sums up Waldorf nicely https://medium.com/age-of-awareness/waldorf-schools-are-inherently-racist-cults-91193d1fbef6

There is no science in the curriculum, which they may change later, and if your child turns out to be more academically inclined you will either need to get a tutor to expose them to more complex materials or find them another school.

I recently had my child assessed by an independent tutor for first-grade readiness as we are transferring to another school and he had only been exposed to 15-20 of the materials he needed to learn to be ready for 1st grade. Obviously, this was an upsetting revelation.

At the end of the day, Waldorf was not for us and I would encourage everyone to research it deeply before committing to having their child attend any Waldorf-based school.