Danube International School Vienna Reviews (7)

Our experience has been the WORST encounter I’ve ever had with a school! We are Ukrainian refugees, forced to come due to the ongoing murder of our people by Russia. We came in early March, where we were told about how welcome we are and how they understand our situation. Despite all of that, it took over 5 weeks to sign up for a trial day! A constant, agonizing back and forth with the dean of admissions. Halfway through the process they forgot about us and asked us to fill out all of the forms again! Finally, after a month my son was able to come for a trial day. 2 hours after he began they began calling my older daughter, harassing her with insistent and repeating calls - telling us to come IMMEDIATELY and pick him up. We were shocked! Not only was the tone of the phone calls extraordinarily rude and demanding, nothing befitting a professional conversation, but also the severity of these phone calls was completely disproportionate to the perceived problem. Turns out my son went to the bathroom too much and used his phone during class - so their response: IMMEDIATE EXPULSION. I had to leave in the middle of my mother’s cancer treatment, just so I could get to school and find out what was wrong with my child! My son was brought out by a supervisor, whom I never met. He informed me “here is your son, take him, we will talk to you later”. Confused, we asked to call so we could get to the bottom of it. We waited for some 30 minutes. They had no explanation for why a school that proclaims to value individuality and to teach empathy could not handle a 13 year old boy who was so petrified and stressed in their classroom he had to hide in the bathroom and why they didn’t even talk to him about it but chose to send him home! After that we talked to the principal, who was as unhelpful. He told us that if a kid doesn’t make it on his first day then he will not make it with them in future. That’s it - I guess everyone gets only 1 chance - if you can’t you are kicked out! And no one could give us an explanation for why they chose to interrupt his trial day and send him home! Overall, Danube is a school that values empathy and individuality only on paper. On their website they are waxing poetic about their love for individuality and how “it is our responsibility to nurture and guide each individual in a healthy and loving community” and how they “hope to raise children to be adults that exhibit empathy”. Yet when confronted with a shy and stressed kid on his first day, they did nothing to make him feel welcome - in his classes he was asked to write on paper while the rest of the kids worked on a project, in the cafeteria no one helped him get food, one adult even volunteered to help him but left and never returned so he ended up going without lunch. Later he was put in an office with a man he didn’t know to wait for me to come to pick him up. All of this is unacceptable and traumatizing for a 13 year old child, stuck in a new place, with barely any english.

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