I went to this middle school for a total of 3 years. I absolutely hated EVERY SECOND of it... Let…read moreme start with the atmosphere of the school... DEAD. Almost all the teachers either seem so out of it they'd rather be in an actual prison, or so deeply depressed in their own lives to actually teach to their struggling students. Seriously, my old Italian teacher would literally tell my friend about her dying marriage in the middle of class. There is a large sum of teachers here who, for lack of a better term, seriously give no fucks. Their teachings methods are LAUGHABLE at best and they do literally nothing aside from patronize students and make it seem like it's entirely their fault. They treat the children here like literal inmates! Kids I know now, call the school Indian Jail, because of how POORLY we were treated.
Bullying is handled SO POORLY, and that's coming from someone who was BEAT UP in this school!! And I was being watched by a gym teacher (who I can't name for legal reasons unfortunately. But I'll tell you this, she's obese and has metal in her knees) . This woman watched as I was beaten up, thrown around, kicked, yelled at and tossed onto the floor for literal months straight. At one point, I was gutted so hard my knee kicked up the sink and it SLAMMED back down on the pipe making a loud noise that echoed through the locker room. And all this woman did was scold me for being loud and not telling her what happened. I have no sympathy for her. I was literally suicidal over it and told school officials who did absolutely nothing about it.
Now let's talk about the jokes that have running the Dean's office. First off, they go through Deans quicker than chain smokers finishing off cigarette packs. And the people they pick to be Deans, always have this tendency to be insanely horrible. One of the Deans (who I again can't mention) brought out a MEGAPHONE during our lunch period to dismiss us to eat... A MEGAPHONE! What are you a warden commanding your inmates? Seriously, half the time I was here it was plainly obvious that all the adults working here were just sad and trying to fulfill the fantasy of being some sort of supreme authority figure. Like, pal this is a middle school... not a correctional facility!?!
Another thing that completely unnerved me when I attended, was the fact that (at least when I went) the entire school was like a time capsule back to 1975. The locker rooms were in such depraved condition that the paint from the lockers was peeling off and piled on the floor. Kids would scrape graffiti onto doors because the paint was so easy to chip off. There were water stains on more than half of the ceiling tiles. Lights would flicker and buzz, there were rumored to be rats in the basement, walls and doors had wood that was SO OLD it would give you splinters, and there was GRIME and MOLD littered across the locker room. Even though no one used the showers? How does that even happen? Pipes and electrical wires would break almost weekly. One time, a pipe burst in the commons during school... and the principal made us stay and EAT WHILE IT WAS BEING FIXED. Forget that your students could get sprayed with water or have a ceiling tile hit them. No, no, no... let's keep them at school instead of dismissing them for a pipe bursting!
The food at the school is downright horrendous... I knew kids who got food poisoning from it. I knew kids who got their lunch taken from them constantly. Some kids would even STARVE because the "lunch monitors" would hold them back from getting their food because some kids were "too loud". Awesome, let's starve these growing kids and punish them for talking during their break period... really? What kind of behavior does this aim to fix or teach? Not to mention that the tables and floors were rarely cleaned well. So all the tables and seats would be sticky to the touch.
I will say this one positive thing about the school... there are good teachers within it's hellish walls. But don't get me wrong here... there are TERRIBLE ones!!! I will name the good teachers I had at this school because they deserve praise: Ms. Luzietti, Mr. Parker, Mrs. Fornek and Mr. Biba. Those are the only fun and good teachers that I can remember at this school. And they didn't do the following: punish their students for having needs or questions, shame their students, or talk about their very personal issues with their students. And I can say this, I actually learned and had good memories in their classrooms. Mr. Parker actually taught me math, Ms. Luzietti actually taught me language arts, Mrs. Fornek made history fun, and Mr. Biba is just awesome no questions lol. But the rest of them are subpar are WORSE.
Overall, if you live in the Addison area... please send your kids to a different middle school... Go to Woodale or Peacock. Because if this place left me with literal trauma and PTSD (I honestly wish I was joking but I'm not) your kid won't survive... trust me. Thanks for reading my essay