Carlos de Hoyos Gutierrez
I know this review will be unpopular with the parents of the children who currently attend Herrera Elementary and I apologize to those parents but its very important to protect all our children...In the Fall of 2012 we enrolled my son in Herrera Elementary 4th grade class and all seemed well, his grades were in the high 80's and 90's, his test scores were very good we were very pleased with his progress at Herrera Elementary...It wasn't until February of that year that I asked my son to read a very short story from a children's book...To my surprise I noticed he really didn't know how to read... so I tested his math skills and again he didn't know how to add or subtract properly....I was confused, how can he be making those high grades but yet not know how to read or properly or complete a math problem?...We attempted to have an open communication with the teacher with no success, we tried with the current administration, again no help there....We ultimately decided to move my son to a Catholic private school where now he is doing probabilities in the 5th grade.....Fall 2013 my wife and I decided to keep my 5 and 8 year Old's in Herrera because of the financial strain from the private school for my son.......again we made a mistake with that decision that we now regret .....We hope that others do not follow in our foot steps...in the winter of 2014 we found that my 8 year old was counting backwards when trying to solving problems (subtraction)....I sent an e-mail to the teacher and again no response, I followed with an e-mail to the asst. Principle where we later scheduled a meeting....We met as scheduled and a solution was agreed on, where the teacher was to spend more time with my daughter....Now its late March 2014 and again I sat with my daughter and nothing had changed...she was still counting backwards...I sent an e-mail to the principle and again set another meeting...My wife attended a meeting with 6 administrators from Herrera in where they told my wife its not important how my daughter came up with the answer as long as the answer was correct...the process to the problem is not as important as the answer....I also discovered that the classrooms at Herrera have slow, intermediate and advanced tables....if your child is categorized as part of slow table be prepared for that child to fall further behind and ignored because of lower test scores.....My attempt to solve the problem with the administration turned to indifference from the Principle and Asst. Principle and rudeness form the office staff...I can only imagine, because of the test score based curriculum, all HISD schools have slow tables, chairs or dark corners with children with learning difficulties...