9 Pine St
Clark, NJ 07066

The reviews here are quite old. The only one that seems relevant to us is the one from 2020, as our child started at Valley Road Elementary in Kindergarten, also with an IEP, and though he had a very rough first half of the year transitioning to a full-time school program (he had difficulty at two half-day preschools before we got him assessed and entered to the half-day preschool program over at the Annex the prior year, which also had its challenges for him, but that's another story), the staff, including his devoted teacher, Mrs Nacht, worked hard to develop systems that allowed our child to enjoy going to school, feeling affection for his teacher and his classmates. I don't know if I always agreed with how the school handled our child's "behaviors" as the ABA folks call it, but frankly I don't know what *I* would do in that situation. I was worried about putting our child into public school in the first place, but it has worked out a lot better than the private schools did, as they have the personal and systems to support neurodivergent kids, while the outdoor school and the Montessori school did not. First grade has been even smoother, overall. The couple of hiccups we've had were minor and nothing to do with the school itself, though my concerns over core curriculum and how subjects like math are taught to kids was reinforced by one of these incidents, as our child learned how to add several years ago, and when asked to solve a problem, he just knows the answer and gets confused when asked to explain how the answer was arrived at, leading to some unintentional conflict. If there was more understanding around this and perhaps some explanation as to why methodology is so important, maybe it would go smoother, since understanding the why of things is very important to our child and imagine it would go a long way toward improving compliance toward "showing the work," much less doing it the way that is being taught. At any rate, I wasn't sure being in school was going to work--we ultimately wanted our child to be able to engage with other children regularly while we work on social skills--and that has been fairly successful. We are delighted that our child actually wants to go to school, and would recommend Valley Road Elementary for parents looking for an environment where their children's learning will be supported regardless of whether they have learning differences and different needs. At least that's been our experience.