Altona Middle School

This is our daughter’s 3rd year at Burlington. The teachers and staff have all been very friendly and supportive. They work with challenging her learning as she is ahead of her peers.

My only quibble about this school was how they did looped years. Before enrolling my son in 2nd grade, I was informed about it, but I assumed it was K-1, 2-3, 4-5. I enrolled my son as a new student but what I was not told was that looping started in grade 1. My fault for not asking questions, but boy did it make the adjustment period very difficult on my kid. I would not have enrolled him if I had known that he would be the only new student in a classroom with a a full year of established routines and friendships. Thank God we got over that.

At this school, I have experienced difficulties about my race, and some teachers have acted like this was never a problem, or acted as if they never heard about it. This school is good in the other categories, but not that much for safety.

Overall, I am extremely pleased with Blue Mountain. They foster an environment of parent inclusion and communicate very well. Our child has difficulties reading and the staff was quick to identify and action plan to assist as best they can with their resources. The teachers so far have been very open to meet and discuss how your child is performing and what else can be done to help if needed.

This is my review of middle school here. The teachers are great and really care about us. The environment is nice, it feels more like a living room than a classroom, which makes it way easier to get work done. The curriculum is good, it’s challenging but if you ask for help, the teachers make it really clear and easy to understand. We have a time called self peace, which is 15 minutes of wordless calm music with the lights off where you just get to do anything that’s silent. Drawing, reading, knitting, napping, etc. it’s nice to just relax for a little bit. My experience in 4th-6th grade was a trainwreck. The teachers were not very dedicated to the job, or were dedicated, but didn’t teach well. Two of them were great though. In 6th grade, I was struggling with math, and my teachers response was to just not make me do math. Our teacher was nice, but she didn’t have any control over us. She let us just sit and talk, instead of doing work. Now that I’m in 7th grade, I’m actually learning well, and I enjoy going to school. Everyone gets along well and the teachers are great at helping us resolve conflict. There isn’t really bullying here. At our last social we were jamming out to let it go and it was fun to see a bunch of teenagers acting like we were 5 again.