Sunset 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.

Not once has my kid come home and told me what they’ve learned, nor have they exhibited knowledge that I could presume came from their class. The classes are overrun with unruly kids and teachers that are checked out from their responsibility. The principal can do absolutely nothing to control violent kids and will tell you “it’s a public school, we have to have a space for everyone.” They have a policy that stops them from speaking with you as a parent about any other kid in class. This helps them essentially do nothing about any recurring violence because it’s impossible to pin down the problem. Despite this rule, I have heard from a fellow parent that the teacher put blame on my kid for starting the problem. We’ve had the teacher and principal in a meeting and told them to let us know if our kid was at all creating this problem and they both assured us they were not. The teacher, I know has a problem with how the class was run but was essentially a ventriloquist doll in the meeting, afraid to say anything the principal would not be happy with. We were excited to have our kids in this school, but with the lack of transparency, and reluctance to put safety and learning above all else, we have become totally disenchanted with the school and it’s leadership.

My kid goes to this school and he’s told me many bad things about it I Heard there’s a rat problem, also the play area has safety hazards I heard a kid broke his arm falling there’s no bars preventing kids from falling in the slide, also bad teachers the music teacher told my kid if there’s ever an intruder everyone to them self’s yet their still kids? How are they gonna defend themselves? and if kids don’t finish their homework they make them run laps until the end up recess I would understand if it was a couple laps but the whole recess is over doing it. My kid also told me he was in bathroom using number two when a woman teacher walks in because another student was trying to use the stall so she peeked through the cark, why is there woman in the boys bathroom first of all, and the food isn’t very nutritious and if our kids want seconds they have to pay, I also heard these leakages in the bathrooms every here and then and they have no paper towels how are our kids supposed to dry their hands and the soap doesn’t restock till weeks later, talk about nasty hygiene I’m surprised this school is still holding up in my opinion I don’t recommend this school at all .

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.

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.