Denman (James) Middle School

I love the community at Longfellow and the PTA is very active. The teachers have been amazing. My son is in first grade and he loves his school!

After a horrible experience at another school for Kindergarten, we decided to move our child to Monroe for 1st grade. It has been a wild success.Our son went from regularly thinking of himself as a troublemaker and describing himself as stupid at his old school to performing well above grade level academically (in reading and math) and socially integrating within one semester to his new environment. He's even started to take on a mentorship role with some of his classmates with their schoolwork. What he really needed wasn't a more rigorous disciplinary regime, but an environment that encouraged his creativity and curiosity, a place where his energy is treated as more of an asset than a problem. It's been a great experience so far.Note: this is a review for a multiracial, already-bilingual child in the Spanish immersion program.

This school is honestly horrible, My daughter has been going to SFC since kindergarten, it was an amazing school at first but this new principale has changes on everything and the lunch lady likes to put her hands on my daughter and other students. The security guard is very disrespectful with students, I am working on moving my daughter to a better school, she gets bullied and comes home really upset and sometimes even crying, because the teachers give her a hard time, or because the students at this school bully her. I am so done with this school honestly I am moving my daughter out of the school and she will not be back. Please for the sake of your childs well being, dont put them in this school. And not only that but this school is extremley understaffed. The math teacher for middle schoolers is the history teacher, she doesnt know what shes doing and I want to provide my daughter a great education, so therefore I am taking her out of SFC. If you want your child to have a good education, please please I beg of you, dont bring them to sfc. This is the last place I want my daughter to be.

My child was mercilessly bullied and this was hardly noticed by staff, in our few years here we saw allot of teachers and coach jam leave, some of this came with budget cuts but some is just the changing culture of a “rising school”. The individualism of families in million dollar homes driving German cars and switching their kids out to private is very evident, this is a magnet school for lower performing zip codes and a parking lot for its own zip code, parents openly talk about getting out of public before jr high, we found that our kid (though getting good grades) was way below his grade level at private. Though sunnyside won’t admit how many kids should be repeating grades due to learning loss, the entrance tests tell a different story.Rough kids are never disciplined, the school social worker has them signing contracts for behavior that don’t hold any weight. We had reports of open threats of violence at least weekly. Stuff that would be a felony for an adult is glazed over with a “restorative conversation” among 7 year olds. It will help if you play soccer, have your kid wear shin guards all day as kicking is a common salutation among peers. I felt like I needed to deprogram my son from the casual violence in this school. Kids are constantly telling each other to “shut up” or worse and the bullying is out of control particularly after returning to in person. As this is one of the better SFUSD schools they get some good teachers (we were there k-3) but they don’t stay, I don’t think the new principal is bad, I think the school was a mess when she stepped in. I think there are a handful of involved parents willing to do the uncomfortable work a mixed income school needs and allot of checked-out parents who shuttle their kids from this free option to a screen. The school adjusts to the non existent attention span of techies children with busy work, there is little room for collaborative work or individual growth in a school this size, moving to private we see longer projects and more collaboration but we are also repeating a grade by moving our child as the school will not hold kids with obvious delays back. We were constantly told our son was “doing fine” when he’s a full year behind.This was a working class neighborhood school. Today this is majority single income homes with a few diversity hires, it actually reminded me of my first Silicon Valley job in the early aughts, utopian but an unstable environment with a revolving door

I dont recommend this school for my child. She would constantly come home crying saying the teachers wouldnt be fair to her. She has also told me that the teacher targets her and picks on her for no reason. And this school is constantly asking for money.