23627 Big Sky Walk #123
Santa Clarita, CA 91354

Helmers is an excellent school with a caring, supportive staff, wonderful school activities and enrichment opportunities, and strong academics.

My daughter recently graduated from VHS. We moved to the area specifically because of the "great" schools. Don't be fooled. The schools are not great--they are slightly above average but far from great, but VHS is considerably below average despite what test scores may indicate. Students who do well are the same students who would do well anywhere, not because of the school. My daughter, who is now at one of the top colleges in the country, was constantly complaining about the lack of teaching--she essentially had to teach herself most of the material especially in the AP classes. The cheating among students is out of control and the principal turns a blind eye to it. Another thing he turns a blind eye to is bullying--the school does not foster a sense of community, decency, or fairness. Let's not talk about the counseling staff. There is no direction or guidance at all. If your child is college bound, you had better not rely on VHS to guide him or her. My daughter's counselor told her several things that were verifiably false and could have derailed her college application process. Luckily, my daughter was able to navigate through four years here without too much damage but I feel sorry for kids who rely solely on VHS for a decent education, guidance, or supportive community because they will find none of it here.

AOC has to rethink its policies and create a student-focused school environment and it especially needs to readjust its policies and treatment of special needs students.There is too much unnecessary homework at this school. The instructions are confusing, sometimes conflict, and the instructions change without email notice to the students.Most weekends and holidays have to be spent doing homework and projects and studying for tests for AOC and COC classes. There is not much free time or time to develop a students' individual interests and goals that would help them in their college applications. Too much group projects where some of the students try to dominate and mistreat others and/or do not do their fair share of the work. Some of these students even use profanity and encourage each other to do sex and drugs in group texts.The large clique of group of students exclude and bully some of the students. Some of the teachers can be rude, mean, and incredibly unjust in their policies. A teacher even made threatening comments to students. But not much is done about issues when it's reported.In order to even attend this school, special needs students' parents have been required to sign away their rights to special needs services such as speech and language therapy or resource therapy. AOC sometimes does not follow the IEP accommodations such as extra time that is stated in their IEP (as is mandated by IDEA law) during the regular school year or summer school. For example, during the Summer Honors Geometry, students with special needs were not granted extra time as stated in their IEP and they felt forced to drop out of this class when they worked so hard to qualify for this class (when they got As in Honors Algebra 1, Honors Algebra 2/ Trig classes that they had to take prior to Summer Honors Geometry. This summer geometry teacher emailed that even if a students fails one test the student would fail entire geometry course (even because of an illness or internet issues). In fact they got all As in their classes were not allowed to move onto COC precalculus in the fall (whey they qualified with their A grades and COC algorithm for math) and now are forced to take regular geometry over the school year (because AOC does not have summer geometry over the school year) where they are not being given complete test reviews with problems and solutions (as the rest of the math classes are for AOC or other jr. high and high schools in the district have been given)

From my point of view, the learning here is engaging and includes every kid in the class. Teachers make it their full-time responsibility to help minors in any way they can. Students are very open to friendships, and, from my experience, no student has been bullied. Safety is also the school's main priority. Frequent drills take place on the school campus and are taken very seriously. Furthermore, from my experience, School field trips have been taken to the LA zoo, New York, Washington DC, and Medival times. Families are also allowed to volunteer as chaperones. Overall, I would recommend this junior high school 100% of the time.