Rainier Prep

This is a wonderful school. The teachers and staff are very involved. The school also recently scored very highly in the Smarter Balance testing. Much better than the average Highline middle school.

Love this school! My children are doing great there.

This school is great because there is no fights

After going to the school for 2 years and graduating from 8th grade I realized that this school was a good place to be. After you get over how bad the lunches are you start to realize that the teachers/staff really care about you and they want to shape you in to fight for what's right type of way (Mr.carey). And the amount of friends you make are amazing. The staff at Rainier prep treat you like family. When you get in to trouble the first thing they do I try to make sure that you will never do it again. I loved my school and as much I said bad things about rp the place made me who I am today.

We've lasted one year before we started looking for other middle schools to switch to. The school is alright academically. I really believe they challenge kids, given by the amount of homework my son had every night. But they lack in other departments. Our issues started with their buses. They don't have enough buses or bus routes, the kids are dropped and picked up a 10-15 minute walk from home. Which didn't sit well with us, specially since our son's pick up and drop off location happened to be right infront of a 7/11 with daily drug deals happening publically in the open. For safety reasons, we had to switch our work schedules to facilitate his drop offs and pickups, after our numerous concerns with the school fell on deaf ears.

My son took home lunches 99.9% of the time, but as a parent, I didn't like the fact that they infringed upon what I put in my child's lunch bag. A bag of chips? A cookie for desert? Oh, they had an issue. Never mind there was nothing remotely edible on their daily lunch menus, ever. We had an incident where they've sent letters home apologizing for mistakenly serving the kids pork, again we took home lunches daily, so that didn't affect us but I can only imagine the poor students, about 90% of them being Muslim/Somalis..

Their ridiculous menu and their strict rules on home lunches is probably to make up for the lack of not having a gym in the facility and having to shortcut PE into recess. We live in Washington State for God's sake, it rains 9 months out of the year, your kid will be outside for recess and PE , wether it's pouring, hailing or snowing. I've literally watched the kids outside in below 30° weather huddled under trees....because the school can't keep them in their classes since it was being used by another class. We've braved pneumonia and the common cold so often that it became part of our daily houseld routines. The teachers have this "collective punishment" system where if one kid misbehaves, the entire class suffers the consequences because according to them they're a "village". I'm sorry but that's beyond ridiculous and teaches zero personal accountability.

So there you have it, curriculum wise it's ok, it's just lacking in all other areas. Literally. My son lasted one school year and it's proven to be the longest and the most frustrating. We're over the hype that is Rainer Prep, and has been 3 months into it, to be honest. We should've done our homework before we jumped the gun. Their high turn-over rates should've told us something. I'm glad my son is starting 6th grade in a more productive environment that we're all happy with.

Hibi