Northwood Elementary School

We have a second grader and a kindergartner at Northwood. Our second grader's teacher in particular has been excellent at working with my child to help her and us address potential learning obstacles. Her approach has been very knowing and thoughtful but what really stands out is how much she cares about helping our child. We are very happy with our kindergarten teacher (who was also our older child's teacher that year) and the principal seems to be running things very smoothly. Art, music, and gym have been favorites of our kids so things are good there but we would love to see more teacher time made available. The PTA is very involved and when we volunteered for the Science Fair we found it to be very well run. The parents we've run into seem to care about the kids getting a good education but do so without the attitudes that might occur in a private school or a public school in a very high income neighborhood.

If your child is not learning as fast as the others, you as a parents are always doing work he was supposed to do at school on weekends. School needs to provide more help and resources for students with learning difficulties.

Considering the tax revenue of Royal Oak, this school should be on par with the top 20 elementary schools in the state, and it is no where near that with regards to preparing students for the technological global environment. They don't have a full-time degreed librarian on staff either--due to budget constraints.

This is our 3rd year at Northwood and faculty and PTA is top notch.