ILIM school - or scam?
A quick Charlotte based mystery for you all.
Founded in 2021, ILIM school in Pineville, NC has sought to ‘disrupt’ traditional schooling by offering Montessori-Reggio language immersion classes paired, of course, with exorbitant tuition. The tuition now is around $26,550/year. Quite a hefty investment for a preschool - 8th grade program.
The owner, Dria Etienne, is a ‘small business owner and international traveler.’ Despite claiming to revolutionize education, she has no background or experience in education.
What Etienne lacks in education experience, she apparently makes up for in marketing. The slick website is designed to resemble a techbro’s pitch rather than a school website. Equally as impressive are the newsletters, social media posts, and videos churned out regularly.
Strangely, the website and newsletters are peppered with architectural models of futuristic, gorgeous schools that do not exist. ILIM seems to be running out of a strip mall.
ILIM’s main selling point is their language program. Their website boasts about it on nearly every page. One blurb confidently reads: “Your child will be fluent in four languages (Mandarin, Arabic, Spanish, and English) by middle school.” Yet another infographic says “100% fluency in four languages!”
Extraordinary claims such as this demand extraordinary evidence. Mandarin and Arabic are classified by the Foreign Service Institute as level 4 languages. They are the most difficult languages for an English language learner to achieve fluency in. Basic fluency would require 800 hours of serious study for each language.
The level of serious study and immersion required to achieve fluency in these two languages would be immense.
For a school to claim 100% of students achieve fluency in any language would be suspect, let alone two of the hardest languages for English natives.
Additionally, fluency is left poorly defined. Fluent by what metric? It doesn’t appear that they are actually testing the students to gauge their fluency. They simply expect parents to believe their children will be quadrilingual, no questions asked.
ILIM claims their students score two grades above grade level on standardized tests. These tests are not specified and this data is not available to the public thus far.
More research into ILIM staff betrays a series of bad online reviews.
Staff report a high turnover rate - which is a huge red flag in preschools. One review states that the school is NOT a Montessori school. There is no training and teachers are often left with no support.
Note: Montessori schools/teachers must be certified by a Montessori organization. Typically schools will claim to be Montessori inspired to skirt the certification requirements while still using the Montessori name for marketing.
Salaries for teachers at ILIM look to be much lower than expected, especially when compared to schools with comparable tuition rates such as Charlotte Latin. Teacher credentials are not available to the public. It leaves one wondering if the teachers are certified at all.
ILIM now appears to be attempting to franchise.
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My speculation is that ILIM is a poorly run school with a subpar program using misleading or false advertisement to lure in prospective parents. I believe this school could very well be opening themselves up to lawsuits in the future simply based on the claims they have posted online.
I would love to hear how you all view the school - especially if you have any personal experience with ILIM.