400 El Camino Real #214
Belmont, CA 94002

We were so sad when our eight years at Central came to an end - it has felt like "home" for our kids, but also for us as parents in the community there. Both our children went through from grade K to 5, and while they had different teaching lineups, overlapped with different principals/leadership teams, and are very different students - they both had an amazing experience. No school is perfect, but Central is an excellent school. Kids at Central are taught from kindergarten on up that they are part of a community of learners, that they are responsible for their actions, that they can develop a growth mindset, that their orientation should be toward learning not "just testing." Central has amazing test scores, including for groups of kids that traditionally do not test as high - one was to gauge the success of a teaching program is not to look at the kids who would do well on academic testing anywhere (which is frankly the majority of the kids at this school) - but to look instead at the kids who don't traditionally score as well. Central's populations of kids at economic disadvantage, learning English, and with various disabilities all perform extremely well compared to the rest of the state and even the district. This is a ringing endorsement of how hard the teachers there work, and how well they understand teaching and learning. We are sad to leave Central, and will miss the friendly and bright campus environment - but we know that our kids are going out into the world of Middle School super well prepared from the years they spent here. Thank you Central!!

Bullying and harassment is a constant issue. Instead of the teachers stopping bullying, or people yelling racial slurs, or graffiti, (which is all very common) they have unjust punishments on people who don't deserve it. The teachers don't try to help our mental health (which gets worse every day we're here), in fact, they actively lower it and make us miserable. Just don't go here.

Having attended Carlmont High School myself I find many of this school's teachers to have the wrong approach to learning. Nearly all classes are based around memorizing and busywork, close to zero focus is placed on developing useful life skills other than in math and science classes. I personally felt my talents to be completely wasted at this school and have even heard teachers gossip about students to other teachers which cannot possibly be acceptable. Test scores and ratings for this school are high because the students here come from wealthy and successful households, I personally found myself to have learned more from my parents than from the teachers at this school. Key evidence pointing at this is that those students who come from underserved communities or have parents with low incomes tend to perform poorly, whereas the wealthy students with good home environments perform well. Secondly, this school didn't educate me at all about the benefits of the community college system, only placing it as "that's where you go if you can't go anywhere else" which is a completely wrong approach if you actually understand - most reading this will likely disagree, aka you don't understand how the transfer system works.Counselors at this school would take over two weeks to respond to inquiries which I find completely unacceptable, and even though the office staff cares about the students the thought of replacing teachers who don't do their job properly appears to never cross their mind. I know many here, primarily parents, idolize this school and find it to be the best ever, I personally graduated early from this school and have had exposure to different systems, even hearing from past Carlmont teachers and other adults who truly vocalized critical viewpoints. If you are a student and want to do well, or a parent of a student here, don't waste your time on AP classes, the college board is a for-profit organization and MANY flaws have been found about this system. (A correlation between lengths of essays and higher scores even if they were poorly written has been found - plus many schools don't even accept these anymore). Instead, start taking concurrent enrollment classes at community college as soon as you are mentally ready and developed far enough, I can guarantee you won't regret it. Even if continuing to a private 4-year institution starting in freshman year of college - you'll want college counselors, not Carlmont's.