Three Creeks K-8

Special needs children can struggle at Three Creeks. It’s in your best interests to stay in close communication with the school and advocate, advocate, advocate! The school is quite large and kids with extra needs can fall through the cracks.

The upper grades were difficult for our neurodivergent child, who experienced quite a bit of bullying. The bullying decreased significantly with a change of dean, but not entirely. Don’t hesitate to inform the school if your child is being teased or bullied so it can be addressed.

There is a social worker with limited experience who made egregious accusations about our family that were incredibly damaging to both our child and family. A few scars on our child’s arms–the likes of which every kid has on their arms–were professed to be from him being abused at home “because he’s adopted and the family tried to give him back as a baby, so now they are targeting him for abuse.” The social worker did not even KNOW our son AT ALL, had never had a conversation with us, and in spite of her lack of familiarity, she ignored the social worker who DID work with our son the year before, who cautioned her that our son exaggerates a lot. We’ll forever question the motives behind these false allegations, which deeply hurt the child they were purporting to protect.

The false allegations came on the heels of a full year of our child’s needs being neglected. He wasn’t given the supports he needed to be successful, didn’t pass math or writing, and was described to us at the end of the school year as “an antagonist with no friends.” The school did not truly SEE or understand our child; if they had, they’d have understood his background, the handful of diagnoses he came to them with, and would have thought twice before disrupting our family with fallacious accusations due to a single statement made by our son who has a history of saying the wildest things (his history of dishonesty was included in the battery of assessments performed by the school when they screened for IEP eligibility).

The school tried to make our child’s attention-seeking behaviors at school a family problem, when they clearly came on the heels of a hellacious school year in which he had no friends, felt poorly about himself, got in trouble regularly, and struggled emotionally. After an incredibly difficult year, he saw an opportunity to win the affections of a brand new teacher at the start of the year; all it took was a single statement made by our son for the social worker to make up a story that would corroborate what our son had said (we’ve been videoing him since he was a toddler saying outlandish things in case we ever needed proof that he has a history of making up stories, but did the school listen closely when we shared his history? Their school resource officer was 100% unwilling to learn about his history or even learn that we had videos of him saying the wildest things. She makes rash decisions that aren’t fair to families, and does not do thorough investigations before writing senseless citations; it’s like she WANTS families to be guilty in spite of the damage it can cause to be involved with the legal system).
Never mind that we are hands-on and involved parents, that our children have never shown any signs of being abused (timid, fearful, mistrusting of adults, etc.), that they show up to school EVERY day and have never had a single mark of abuse on them. NOTHING aligned with our child being abused, but they biased the School Resource Officer before she even got to our home and issued one spouse an unfounded citation. Not to mention, the school called CPS in addition to the police (nothing like putting a double-whammy on an innocent family). The child and family EXPERTS determined there were no signs of abuse, but our lives had already been turned upside down by the false charges made by their school officer.

We do not trust Three Creeks to have the best interests of our children in mind after the experiences we’ve had with them and their lack of acknowledgement or communication about the entire situation. It seems as if they want to tear families apart by making false statements against them rather than sticking with the facts. “Hey, the kid said this. His school record says he has a history of telling stories. He has no abuse marks on him, nor do his siblings. What he said is questionable and does not seem to align with what we’ve seen of the family.” As opposed to the way the situation was twisted to make the parents look abusive and painted us in a bad light. Claiming we tried to give him back after the long process and expenses of adopting him wasn’t mandated reporting…it was false reporting!

Their School Resource Officer lacks knowledge about special needs and was closed-minded to learning about our child’s unique needs and how they present. She probably isn’t the best person to be working with children since she will run across many special needs children in her career as a school officer, and the news is filled with SROs who mishandle students with special needs. We’re hoping the new mandated trainings for SROs in Colorado will spare other families from going through similar experiences as we did. Our negative interactions with Officer D at Three Creeks caused a significant amount of pain and suffering for our family, resulting in therapy and medicating children for anxiety. She interrogated our three oldest children, asked them leading questions, ignored the truths they told her, and proceeded with her version of what she believed to be true in spite of no evidence. She then showed up at our home and interrogated us in front of our children, who are now terrified of police, having seen the dishonesty with which they operate and the ways they assume the worst about people in spite of a complete lack of evidence to the contrary. 

Having neurotypical children AND neurodivergent children, I could have written two totally different reviews about Three Creeks. If we didn’t have two children with special needs, this review probably would have been much different. There are some great teachers and not so great teachers. The academics are pretty good. It’s a new building and the parents are pretty involved. If I didn’t have neurodivergent kids, I wouldn’t have much of an opinion one way or the other. As it is, we felt discriminated against. Is it because of our family size? is it because we contact the school more frequently? We have several children there, and more than one has special needs. Is it because they denied our kid the academic support he needed so we became the squeaky wheel? Is it our religion? We will never know for sure. All we know is, when we were advocating for our child to be supported at school, they called CPS on our family saying we needed more supports. We did not need more supports; our child needed academic support; the school was either oblivious to or in denial about his needs!

We decided to switch to a school where our children will be SEEN and where we’ve been told they treat each other like family. Living through the experience we did at Three Creeks nearly tore our family apart. We’re hoping they’ve learned a lot from our experience and that it hasn’t been in vain. We’re sharing our story in the hopes that people will learn from our experience and hopefully be better able to protect themselves by doing things differently than we did (especially with regards to hiring a lawyer or a special ed advocate IMMEDIATELY when a child is struggling at school and not getting the help they need). We were caught COMPLETLEY off-guard and never want to find ourselves in that situation again! Our family almost didn’t make it through the immense amounts of stress and anxiety intact.