110 Soaring Eagle
Irvine, CA 92618

I attend Jeffrey Trail Middle School currently from 24-25 and 25-26 and it was honestly a underwhelming experience. Some of the staff (teachers, teacher assistants, principal and vice principals, front office, etc) were okay but certain teachers often showed bias or didn’t show the same treatment towards all students. There was also frequent racism from students and bullying or harassment wasn’t uncommon, and the school is pretty blind about it unless seen directly on camera or a staff member witnessed it. The students also didn’t seem excited to learn because we mostly learned the same topic frequently in class. In my experience, I only had fun because of me creating memories with friends, but it was overall not a great experience.

Personally I think I've had the best experience in this school out of all the other schools I've attended here in California, as well as back in my home country. It might not be fair to compare schools in Glendale and the post-soviet elementary schools from my childhood to a neat and well funded school in Irvine, but I truly didn't have that many negative experiences here (by my own standards). Frankly though, if you were to ask some of my friends and peers, they might give you a very different answer, but that's their story to tell and not mine.

I'm struggling with how different last year was with this year but the majority of it seems to be bad management of behavior on the part of the administration: there's a lot of cliques and kids are openly allowed to bully other kids without recourse. Kids seem to be allowed to be rude to other kids and call them poor or stupid, and the teacher we have seems more inclined to write up a student for performing lower academically than tackling the underlying problem with the socioeconomic divide and exclusion that is causing our student distress. We do not have a special education student but I would worry about how much worse it would be if we did.