Ballard Terrace

Everything is fairly decent until advisory lessons. The school would constantly push their ideology onto students, indoctrinating them, and should students dare disagree the student is for some reason crazy! Focus on learning not indoctrinating

My son has been attending Northridge for a year---he's finishing up 6th grade. It was a financial sacrifice for us to send him here, since we don't have a lot of expendable income, but this was possibly the best decision we've ever made. He was miserable in the public school, going down a bad path, increasingly frustrated and lashing out, searching for some kind of identity, since he didn't particularly excel at anything. The change in him has been incredible. His teachers have shown him so much support. They set high expectations and encourage him to meet them. His grades aren't the best---that's part of setting high expectations! But he is improving and learning so much. I'm in awe of the curriculum---learning to write like Dickens in his language arts class, learning geography in combination with regional history in Europe and the Middle East, the 6th grade math teacher took my son who was failing every test to someone who gets As on every test---partly by having consequences when homework is not done! The band program is also incredible ... Mr. Riccobono has a real gift teaching music to these boys. The faith/religion course is also extremely high quality. I love the various field trips and hall competitions that they have. It's a school that understands boys, their need to compete, their need to move, their need to have purpose and role models. My son had always struggled socially before and now he's making great friends, he's such a happy guy, and becoming a young man of character. My son LOVES going to school, and I know he will miss it over the summer. It's not for everyone---if you aren't on board with the Catholic faith-based elements of the school, it will be a bad fit. It's a low-tech environment. Most middle school kids don't have phones---certainly not smartphones/iphones---and the school might have some computers or chromebooks somewhere but they have not used them in class at all (not in 6th grade!). This was one of the major reasons we originally sent him to Northridge---to escape the pervasive use of ipads at his public school which is awful for learning, and the peer group where everyone had unfettered access to the internet in their pockets. We are happy about that still, but the school has in general just blown us away and we couldn't be happier. I doubt there's a better environment for boys anywhere.