Valley Forge

This school is great! Nice teachers, friendly environment, principal is involved in all school process. Very diverse school, most of kids are bilingual. School provides esl, above math program, gifted programs. We recommend!

From our perspective, this 1st year situation has been above what we ever hoped for. We can’t speak to the Special Ed side of the house but our child can be a bit more on the sensitive side at times, and he is doing very well. During the initial parent tour before the school year started, the principal stated that his primary concern for new kids was that they get better acclimated to the school than overcome by academic pressures. My kid has flourished under this administration. I thought I would never credit any school “non-teacher” for anything. This place has proven me wrong. Back to teachers, my 6th grader comes home and tells me science stuff that blows my mind. Absolutely amazing school and teachers.

I think this school may be a reasonable fit for a narrow group of children, those whose primary disability genuinely is emotional and behavioral regulation, where the behavior itself is the core need rather than a symptom of something else. For a child like that, a program built around behavior and emotional support with modest academic demands is appropriately matched, because there is no underlying learning disability being missed and no cause-and-effect being inverted.Where it falls short is with a different kind of child, one whose behavior is the signal of an unaddressed learning disability rather than the disability itself. A bright, verbal child can have a significant learning disability in reading and writing, hit a wall on all-day academic demands they can't access, and become dysregulated as a result. A program that reads the dysregulation as the primary problem, and builds around managing behavior while leaving the academic disability unidentified and untaught, attempts to treat the symptom and misses the cause. This can result in inappropriately deferring the learning question until "frustration tolerance" improves. But the frustration is being produced by the unmet learning need; the disability is driving the behavior, not the reverse.What concerned me most was the evaluation itself. A full reevaluation can produce the very scores that show a clear reading and writing disability (very low decoding and written-expression results, difficulty blending simple words) and still decline to identify it, attributing the low performance to behavior instead. From a parent's perspective, that reads as an outcome shaped to fit what the program is equipped to handle, with the inconvenient data set aside. When a complete evaluation has the evidence in hand, reads past it, and lands on the conclusion that happens to match the program rather than the child, the practical result is a child whose real needs go unaddressed and whose difficulties get worse rather than better. For families whose children fit that second profile, I'd urge you to read your own evaluation data closely and get an independent set of eyes on it.

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