4th St NW
Hickory, NC 28601

This school is terrible the kids dont feel safe anymore and these people that are teaching are now bullying students

This school is very bad on informing parents of genuinely anything. Yes, we have the occasional post on class dojo, but they leave it up to the students to tell their parents everything, I get that they might be "trying to train us to be more independent", but its really just stupid. They also have the special education kids preform games, or some sort of Olympics in front of everyone, meanwhile telling kids to not make fun of them or make comments, I get that they might be trying to make the school a more accepting place, but thats really just NOT how to do it. They also do absolutely NOTHING about bullying. There are comments made in every class, every hallway, and the most the adults do is tell the kid not to say it and move it. Theres almost no punishment for bullying meanwhile the whole grade level can get punished with silent lunch for something a few kids started or that only a few kids were doing. And I get that its not really the schools fault, but the food sucks most of the time. I feel like they should be more focused on spending money on getting things the students will enjoy than building upgrades, but thats just my opinion. And besides the councilors, which, huge shoutout to them, they are wonderful, the school almost completely disregards students mental wellbeing (and the assistant principal gets a shoutout too.), because a student can be showing clear signs of depression, or anxiety, or with several cases, have extreme social anxiety and then the teachers will force them to read out loud or do a presentation in front of the whole class. And most of the lessons are dry and make it hard to focus and actually learn. Commonlit for example, there's been maybe 1 story on there that wasnt dryer than the Sahara desert. Not to mention the fact that we have limited bathroom breaks, like hello? What if a girl needs to change her pad, or if someone just genuinely has to use the bathroom but didn't have to when it was time for a bathroom break? Do they want us to just use it in the chair? And my parents can agree with me on ALL that I have stated in this review.