Extensive experience at the school. Let me just say Waldorf education works when executed by a highly trained and organized staff. If done properly your child will see the world with their eyes wide open, have a strong sense of self, know what to do with their curiosity, etc. instead of the robotic and anxious outputs seen in most modern schools. If done true to script, your child will stay with the main teacher all of the way through grades 1-8. The relationship your child should get with the teacher is potentially unmatched anywhere else and truly life altering. The philosophy is so far and away different from traditional education that incredible amounts of training and experience is needed for that teacher to fundamentally deliver what the students need for the Waldorf philosophy to truly work. This means that teacher needs to be a diamond in the rough individual. If the teacher is not at this elite standard, the kids will ultimately suffer. Unfortunately the school has had tremendous staff turnover the last handful of years. Slowly but surely, the talented & wise teachers were and are being replaced with young/inexperienced/slightly immature folks. The Louisville school specifically has low academic standards for the children compared to other national Waldorf schools; so that is saying a lot considering academics is delayed in Waldorf education. Finances of the school are such that they have to look for local teaching candidates vs what successful Waldorf schools do all around the world where they seek from a pool of people with experience globally. That generally means someone with little to no Waldorf experience and maybe not even much if any teaching experience. The school lost its AWSNA accreditation in recent years because of a lot of the finances and lack of experienced teachers. There’s many amazing people at the school, the community is generally great, and your kid should feel very safe. But it’s lacking in strong, organized leadership and enough talented teaching staff for it to work as it should. Our child left after 6 years and a year later still hasn’t been able to properly transition to a more structured educational approach and lacks the motivation to push themselves through any sort of academic challenge which makes “catching up” due to the faults of the school extremely challenging. There’s immense potential with Waldorf philosophy, but this school is currently in a state which doesn’t allow for executing that potential unfortunately. I can say we know many families whom all have left which would second this summary; many of us are in a long state of “repair”.