Dolores
Carmel, CA 93950

Robert Down is an excellent school. The children in my son’s class are kind, considerate and love to learn. The teachers have been amazing and supportive. Having gone to private school in the area, this public school is the closest you will get to private school. My child is excelling in every way. If there was one thing I’d change it would be the teacher to student ratio but the staff, principal and parent community are stellar.

This school thrives on nepotism. If you aren't related to the staff or the administration it will be very hard to do well at this school. As a 2020 alum my experience with this school is that although this school has a strong sense of community (due to its small size), it often feels like privacy is compromised as information can spread quickly. Some staff members could improve in maintaining confidentiality because most of them do not and everyone knows everything. The small size also leads to a lot of overlap between staff and student families, which leads to favoritism. Academically, I feel there's an over-reliance on self-learning for new material. Unfortunately, some teachers appear disinterested and lack the enthusiasm necessary to engage students effectively. While some are exceptional, others seem to lack motivation, which can make learning challenging. The school's physical layout and safety measures are commendable, but the academic rigor sometimes feels unreasonably high.

I recently graduated from Pacific Grove Middle School and while the school was generally pretty good, administrative disorganization, one or two incompetent faculty, poorly planned school events, factually incorrect curriculum, as well as many more issues plagued the school. These issues were not noticeable daily but made some days extremely annoying and generally gave the impression that we were not only wasting the time of the students but the staff's time as well. These issues continued to increase in severity as we approached graduation and I wished only for summer break, not for the absence of classes but to be done with the schools nonsense. Let me start off with what I think to be the most pressing issue, the school administration's incompetency. While I had no issues with any single member of the school administration, many of my friends received obviously unjust punishments or even unwarranted punishments, at least according to them. The schools efforts at discipline were obviously not working, the amount of gum chewing, phone sneaking, stealing and fights only increased with our grade level. The school administration also had little mishaps like scheduling fire drills at times when it was nearly guaranteed to rain (we once had to stand in the rain for nearly 15 minutes straight because of a fire drill). Whenever the school announced an event I was always filled with dread. The small events during school hours were always disorganized but at least they were optional. Unfortunately there were some mandatory after school hours events. Take the graduation as an example, we had to skip multiple classes on multiple days to practice because the event was "very important". The event was just the 8th grade sitting in fold able chairs watching members of the staff and student government make speeches up on a pathetic little stage. This was followed by us slowly walking up and getting our diplomas and then sitting back down. The entire event took over one and half hours and I was more bored then than in any of my classes that year. Unfortunately I am near the character limit so I'll summarize the rest. One of the P.E. teachers is completely incompetent, having us do no training for the fitness tests or our unit sport and then blaming our low effort when even one student performs poorly. The weekly advisory class is a complete waste of time and the curriculum regularly contains misinformation.One of the better middle schools in the area.