Intrinsic Schools, Chicago | Fees, Rankings, Address, Admission, Vacancies, Reviews & More

Honestly if I had an option, I would give it 0 stars. I used to go to this school for my middle school years and it was probably the worst experience someone would like to go through. I was and still am, a straight A student who behaved well in school and would like to share my experience. 7th grade definitely changed who I was and changed the perspective of how I viewed different people and things. First of all, a teacher was fired for pulling a girl’s hair. Second of all, (this is not the school’s fault ig) there was shootings and power outages. Third of all, when something happened, they wouldnt tell the students about it and inform them what to do in different situations. 8th grade was honestly worse. Teachers would talk about a student behind their backs, teachers would try to get into students business without their consent, teachers wouldn’t last more than a few months and more. Some teachers are actually nice but most of them aren’t and don’t know what they are doing. Another thing is that they wouldn’t tell the popular kids anything when they did something wrong and when it came to those students that actually behave good and do the minimum thing, they would give them detention. (They also gave detentions for no reasons) Now the students. There was a fight literally every week when I was there. (They occurred for dumb reasons too). The kids wouldn’t respect the staff and would talk back to them. At this point, the students have more power over the school than the staff. There is a lot more about this school, but this is so far the main things I experienced in this school. Just one of the worst schools out there. (I transferred to foreman and honestly I was scared because of the bad reviews but honestly I am having a better time here than at intrinsic).

As a recent employee of Intrinsic, I had a mishandled incident at the school and was treated with a tremendous amount of disrespect, disregard, and contempt! The administrators made me feel extremely uncomfortable, showed absolutely no concern, didn’t offer any solutions for my concern, and appeared dismissive! This is the worst place of employment that I’ve ever encountered. The students are allowed to behave and speak most disrespectfully towards both staff members and other students without being held accountable. The emotional distress that this school and its poor leadership have caused me is indescribable. The students are amazing and have great potential however it starts at the top. If the leadership/administration continues to neglect and ignore the behaviors and daily occurrences then they are contributing to the student’s potentially detrimental future. We are in a time where holding students accountable for certain behaviors can shape their future, we can not neglect this duty or we become a disservice. This school holds some of the most amazing staff members (Teachers, Culture Team, and paraprofessionals) however they are limited in what they can do as far as adequately educating the students due to the lack of support from the superiors. I’m grateful to have worked with the staff and students and I hope that a school with such potential can one day have better leadership in place.

The teachers are great. Failure is not an option. My only issue is that they have out demerits like tictacs. You can barely sneeze without being a demerit. I’d love to see a give and take there. Maybe show the children how good behavior is rewarded, that not everything they do is bad.

05/22/23 Edit: My son graduated in 2017 and my younger son is on track to graduate in a few weeks. They’ve gotten a lot better with demerits. Still a great school with young teachers who are eager to teach. Don’t knock a charter until you’ve tried one.