La Petite Ecole

I would think really long and really hard about whether you're willing to sign an enrollment contract that says “by signing this document, parents are contractually obligated to pay their child’s entire yearly tuition” for your 2,3, or 4 year old.



We're in the situation now where it became apparent that La Petite Ecole was not a good fit for my child, and I would rather pay $2,000 in tuition for the semester than continue to send her to La Petite Ecole, but it still rankles to be paying for the entire semester even though my child attended only 15 days.



Pros: We had a good experience last year in the 2-year-old room, the language acquisition really is amazing, the playground is nice



Cons: the contract, the kids do a lot of worksheets, the teacher would get into power struggles with my three-year-old about things like writing her name, my concerns that my child did not want to come to school and was developing a negative attitude toward schooling in general were dismissed, it was hard to get a report at the end of the day, often I would end up speaking to one of the MU students who would say something like, "oh yeah, she did fine," and then I was blindsided at the parent-teacher conference, there is a fairly strict emphasis on obedience and frequent use of time-out



The tipping point came when I went to pick up my three-year-old and saw that she was not playing in the gym with the other kids. She had been withheld from recess several times before, so I knew what was going on and went to her classroom. I found her sobbing uncontrollably in time-out (apparently for the 10-15 minutes the other children had been at recess) and I was told that she "made a choice" not to sing and that's a "school rule" and now she was "making herself cry."



Other points to consider: There is another language immersion preschool in Columbia, which apparently split from La Petite Ecole the year before we enrolled. I am definitely not endorsing one over the other because I have no personal experience with it, but if you're considering one, you should probably check out both to compare. The Language Tree website: http://languagetreeimmersion.com/Home.html

La Petite Ecole website: http://www.petiteecole.org/