Harmony Elementary School

My child is a student at Harmony Elementary School. Most of the staff and teachers I've encountered are rude, unfriendly, and miserable. The principal is terrible. The curriculum is so incredibly below par, that my child who is now in 2nd grade is still doing classwork he did in Kindergarten at his previous school. There is no homework or challenging classwork. The focus at this school is to cater to economically and/or academically disadvantaged children, which is fine, but it is at the expense of children who are not economically and/or academically disadvantaged. In other words, at HES all children have to be the same on every level. In the long run, this liberal ideology will do more harm than good for these children. I normally don't leave reviews, but my husband and I used the Great Schools website to do our research on Pickens County Schools & HES. If we'd known what we do now about Harmony Elementary School we would have never purchased our home in this school district. To ensure our children receive a successful education, we'll be putting our new home on the market next Spring and leaving Pickens County.

My son just finished the 5th grade at Harmony. He began school there in Kgrtn. At that time the school was just a year old and was quite attentive to its students. My son began having problems in the 4th grade with his work falling below my standards. I would ask his teachers if there was a problem or if I needed to work on anything specific. They indicated that he was doing "fine". I knew things were not fine, but could not get any answers or support. In talking to my son he said that the teachers were to busy disciplining some students so much that they did not have time to help the others. Considering the school had become overcrowded (while other schools in the district had too few children) I could certainly see this scenario. This year I moved my son to a private school where he is repeating the 5th grade. This is not because he was not promoted to the middle school, but because we wanted to have him work on what we were seeing were weaknesses that were unacknowledged. Today I learned that Harmony had him in a RTI intervention yet we were nover notified. This was a severe failing of the school. We could have gotten him assistance, but our lack of knowledge kept us from that.

teachers here are wonderful! we had an amazing time with the school and our daughter would come home each day and talk about what she learn and actually enjoyed school so much we was wanting to go on weekends!

Great school teachers are wonderful and we love the communication we get from the school/teachers my son is having a blast learning and its all because of the great work the teachers do!