30516 Appalachian Dr
Castaic, CA 91384

One look at your skin color and they treat you bad

I’m so glad that my child is at AOC! It’s a small school, about 400 students total, which makes for a tight-knit and welcoming community. My child tells me all the time how everyone is so nice and respectful of one another. At AOC, kids take some college classes at COC, so that upon graduating, they can earn up to 44 units toward their college years and get a lot of their basic college requirements done. The school encourages self-advocacy and maturity, allowing the student to take the lead and preparing them for life in college and beyond. They also teach how the student learns rather than applying the same methods to everyone. I appreciate their group-based and even play-based learning and truly fostering a love of learning and curiosity. I’ve been recommending the school to local friends—it’s a gem in our community.

Yard duties, teachers, and lunch staff are all great, genuine people in my experience. Administration is a joke, which is accented by the principle herself. I would strongly not recommend this school. It uses an all pass situation that causes kids who do not understand topics from a lower grade level—or simply don’t care enough to understand—to automatically pass to the next grade regardless of test scores, academic performance, participation, homework completion, or any other number of factors. This will weigh down your child’s potential to excel in an academic environment even if they would otherwise thrive due to never being challenged or fed a harder information that advances skills beyond grade level. Principle is constantly focused on non-issues, and doesn’t show capability of getting anyone, including other staff members from my observation, to respect her. She doesn’t showcase the ability to command a room, get large groups of people attention, or be stern with anyone ever. High teacher/student ratio, teachers seem exhausted and overwhelmed with job load, but are not inherently bad teachers. School is a failure based solely on administrative responsibility. Any donations won’t be used to improve quality of school for students, and should be avoided.

i went to this school for 2 years 7th-8th, my favorite teachers that helped me so much though out those years were Mr. Galdos, Mr. Simion, Ms. Mariela, Dr. de Lemos, Mrs. de Lemos and Mr. Parent. They helped make school fun and easier to come to!! And shout out to Ms. Alvarez for making ASB fun and making kids have a smile on their faces!