5135 McLaughlin Rd
Beaver Dams, NY 14812

Calvin U. Smith Elementary School is terrific!! I'm on child #3 attending Smith School .. My son's Bruce now 25, Benjamin now 23 and Tyler who just turned 10 .. ALL have had fabulous teachers & came out with so much great knowledge!! Great kids, Great teachers & they have a revolutionary war program that is OUTSTANDING and only for kids in 4th grade ... I could write all day about what great things Smith School has to offer!!

I think overall this is a good school, with some excellent teachers. The main problem is that it's so big that it feels like your child is lost in the crowd. My child was in the IB Program. There is a lot of pressure for kids to do the full certificate program. In retrospect, I think the full program was a bad idea for us. It's a huge amount of work if you include CAS. The oversight of the program feels weak. Student progress doesn't seem to be tracked adequately which is stressful when your child is a procrastinator. Taking part in the program prohibited exploration of other topics because of time and scheduling. In the end, my child was still rejected, deferred or waitlisted by most of the selective schools he applied to, in spite of participation in extracurriculars, etc. You just have to weigh the stress vs the benefits obtained.

I am currently a high schooler who has attended this school, and all I can say is that it was AWFUL. I attended for a 3 years of middle school, and those were the worst 3 years of my entire life. The teachers are careless, the quality of the attending students is far, far below average, and everything about it is awful. To start off, the construction of the school is old, very very old. The pool always has dirt floating in it, with dirty band aids surrounding the deck. The locker rooms for the pool have spiders, more dirty band aids, and hair ALL OVER. Next, the teachers. The teachers don’t care about the students learning progress, and are unable to teach due to the disruptive students which they are unable to maintain. With that said, a couple of the 8th grade teachers are in fact, ok, but a vast majority is not the best. Following, there’s the students. One student has the audacity to punch the glass of a display case in the hallway, causing it to completely shatter. Students are constantly vaping in the bathroom, and 1 even stuck into a cabinet of a biology classroom and sat there, vaping, for 3 class periods. The students are probably the worst part of the school. There are 3 main groups of students, the kids who want to learn, and kids who are careless and don’t care about anything/ vape, and the popular kids. There is constant bullying in this school, and teachers are unable to do anything about it. To add, a student in 6th grade brought a handgun to school one day and another student in 8th grade ended up going to jail (not sure for what). The environment is extremely unsafe overall though. I highly, highly, do not recommend this school, and you would be better off having your child attending the private middle school on Corning instead,