Sunrise Elementary School

The school does an excellent job at bringing the community together with special events such as Back to School Night, School Carnival, Trunk or Treat, Family Field Day and their Culture Night. The staff really pitches in to make the students and their familes feel welcome. My kids have always had a positive experience here. We are a multicultural family and I have seen many staff members who speak spanish helping other families who need assistance. A very caring school community.

i have found that this school, at least for the K-1st grade area is lacking in so many ways. the teaching staff have no idea what they are doing with early childhood development or educations, and expect 5 year olds to not have energy and to just sit down, shut up, and focus all day. as an adult i can barely sit through a meeting at work, and they expect these kids to do it all day. it has been 100% proven that sitting all day is not good for kids, and they need to be more hands on and interactive in order to learn, and the schools still seem to push the sit down and shut up or you are a bad kid who needs to be drugged narrative. My first son who went there got the same treatment, and now he is in middle school and doing fine aka he grew up. now they are saying the same exact thing about my youngest. i talked to other parents and they are getting the same emails, especially the little boys. the staff here lie constantly, and their punishments are extremely inappropriate for their age group with no thought on the child's psyche or social growth and development. i would say that their middle school is decent, but overall, the early childhood stuff is extremely terrible.

I have 2 children that went to this school since 2019. They have always had wonderful teachers there who are supportive of their learning, but we found a lot of these teachers were leaving and there was a lot of turnover in the earlier years. This past year 24-25 there was a new principal that started at this school and she has been amazing compared to the previous principal. She engages with the community, parents, and students and I think she will really revive this school. The school is a title 1 school with all of the challenges that this brings, so I'm sad to see that some areas they don't have as much funding for like a full time music teacher. I really hope that this doesn't get worse in the future given the real potential to eliminate the DoE and the funding that this brings to the school.The biggest criticism I have is that it took a while to get my 2nd child on a specialized learning plan as she has some struggles with encoding/decoding and this doesn't show up in her overall test scores because she is gifted in other areas. So it took a while to get this taken care of, because you have to dig deeper at her reading scores and evaluations to get to that. Fortunately we got the attention of the new principal and her teacher and were able to get her on the right path.

Most of the staff is amazing. Sadly, there are people who try to run things when they have no right or experience (ex. ILC paras-not all, just some). They leave the room disgusting while they sit and do nothing but gossip, backstab, and gaslight other adults. Only a few of them actually support how they are asked to suport. Several good teachers have left because of this. They need to be removed before more lives are negatively affected.

We absolutely love Aspen Crossing! The staff are amazing from the front office, the leadership, to the support in the classroom! We love the character development and values being taught and are so grateful to be apart of this community!