15022 Kimberley Ct
Houston, TX 77079

I have never had a bad experience with NHE. I was shocked at the reviews I read. I may need to move soon and it is so hard to find a rental zoned to this school. People are trying their best to be in this zone. All of the teachers, parents and children I have met have been awesome and my son loves it and I am very sad to be possibly leaving.

The school building itself is very old and built like a maze. The children do not get to use lockers and must lug around their heavy backpacks all day! There are problems with theft and violence in the past (not lately). My son’s Spanish teacher quit the day before school stared and he had to transfer electives. Also, his backpack was stolen during after school sport and I used an app to locate it still in the school (locked) but the school official we found to be still inside the building refused to help so my son had to go home without phone, school laptop, etc. This school needs help, it feels like it is in a downward spiral.

This review applies to the schools in the feeder pattern Meadow Wood Elementary-Spring Forest Middle-Stratford High School, and to an extent to Spring Branch ISD in general, after having children continuously enrolled from 2006 to present. Overall I think that Spring Branch is a district that provides a mediocre education, but relies on the test scores of children from affluent families south of I-10, who would score above average no matter what, to buoy its overall academic performance and make it appear like a high performing district, while the performance in the lower income schools north of I-10 tells a different story, while these schools and their families are often neglected to cater to the affluent schools. I have been unimpressed with the teachers at Meadow Wood, Spring Forest, and Stratford. Writing, in particular, is poorly taught, with too much emphasis on stream-of-consciousness journaling, and students enter, and go through high school without being properly taught how to structure an informative or persuasive paper. Science is also poorly taught at the secondary level, even in pre-AP and AP level classes, particularly biology and chemistry, which I have degrees in, and had to teach my children myself, because the instruction was sub-par. History instruction has also been pretty bad. In 8th grade US History at Spring Forest, far too much emphasis was placed on time consuming arts and crafts projects, with lots of points taken off for "not being creative enough" and titles not being written big enough, things that had nothing to do with actually demonstrating knowledge of the topic. In high school AP World history, the teacher, a coach, regularly interjected his own extreme political positions into classroom discussions, such as a justification of Jim Crow laws, comparing Canada to Nazi Germany because of its assisted suicide laws, etc. He also called a girl the epithet for female dog to her face in class. Yet he was allowed to continue teaching despite parent complaints.It's not just the instruction, it is the community culture and values in the neighborhoods that feed into Stratford and Memorial High Schools. So many wealthy, entitled students, whose bad behavior is enabled and defended by parents. Wild parties fueled by alcohol bought by the parents, designer drug use, academic dishonesty, unsportsmanlike behavior at and around football games that has been allowed to continue unchecked for years.