New City Elementary School

What the New City School will not tell parents up front is that they are primarily a Spanish-language school. We enrolled our student at this school happily after hearing of their immersion programs and dual-language approach in the thought that it could only benefit him to learn Spanish, but were appalled to learn the following: The native Spanish speakers and native English speakers are segregated. For Spanish speaking students, 85% of instruction is Spanish, the remainder English. For English speaking students, 30% is done in English, 70% Spanish. At this point we are eight months into the year and our child can not count past ten, name the primary colors, or recognize anything beyond como estas? or buenos dias in the Spanish language. He tells us daily of entire blocks of time where he understands not one word of what is said, and is allowed to sit idle while others participate. In addition, we have not received a single report card or seen more than one test result the entire year, giving us very little gauge for our child's performance in school. When our child had behavioral problems we asked his teachers to prepare a short daily report to incidicate what issues there may have been so that we could work together to correct them. These reports, penned by teachers mind you, frequently included flagrant grammatical errors that were even noticed by our child when reviewing them together at night. We voiced our concerns to the teachers involved about the use of poor English by those who were responsible for teaching him and were greeted with a cold and uncomfortable attitude which only grew worse after we were told by the school's director, If you do not like how we do things you should find another school. The New City School has great potential, but from our experiences they are unaccepting of criticism and unwilling to change. At this time there is no way I could in good conscience recommend this school to any other parent.