Victory Academy

I wouldn’t recommend it. My daughter is being bullied, and unfortunately, the teachers either can’t or won’t step in to stop it.

Shady Hill is a good school, but it is not for everyone. We chose to enroll through school choice because of the school’s strong reputation, positive reviews, recommendations from friends, and long-standing record of academic success.However, we quickly learned that communication with parents is not one of the school’s strengths, especially when it comes to children who may be struggling. As active and involved parents, we repeatedly expressed that we wanted to work as a team because the ultimate goal is for our child to succeed. Despite this, social workers became involved and our child was sent to speak with a psychologist without our prior knowledge or communication.We were often told that someone would call us back, yet follow-up rarely happened, even when we attempted to contact the school ourselves through phone calls or ClassDojo messages.Additionally, throughout third grade, teachers rarely contacted us regarding behavioral concerns or struggles our child may have been having. Instead, comments were allegedly made to our child such as, “I hope the kids at the other school actually like you.” When our child attempted to apologize and take accountability for behavior, those apologies were reportedly dismissed with statements that staff were “too busy” to listen.Another disappointing experience involved Field Day. We were never informed that parents were allowed to attend and cheer on their children. As a result, our child came home upset that we were not there while many other students’ parents attended. Had we been informed, we absolutely would have participated.In our opinion, Shady Hill can feel like an exclusive-type school at times. When a child is facing challenges, transparent communication and genuine partnership with parents are essential, and unfortunately that was not our experience.

I went to this school. The teachers themselves are good. However, the faculty (the dean, principal, councilor, and assistant principal were very iffy. First of all, my mother wanted to speak with the dean alone about something for my upcoming senior year. The dean agreed. My mother arrived there a few days later, and walked into the deans office to see both the principal and my math teacher in there. First of all the dean lied to my mom, and so that lost all of my mom’s respect for that school, including my respect for it as well. Next we have the councilor, who was constantly picking favorites and always had an attitude. She purposely bended an expensive hat only after the student had said it was expensive, just because she wanted to prove a point. The same woman was also getting with the assistant principal whom I will talk about next. The assistant principal also taught algebra 1, however he never showed up to class, at least when I had his class, and he also picked favorites. Now for the principal. He’s nice, but he’s too nice. He refuses to discipline anybody unless they were to do something where he was forced to put in action. And he again, picked favorites. There’s a trend going on here. Everybody’s picking favorites, and if you aren’t one of the favorites, you get the short end of the stick. Many of my classmates hardly did anything “wrong” in my opinion, and were still disarmed for either wearing a hoodie durring the winter (and when the heat wasn’t working but the principal had claimed that it was. It was 52 degrees in the science classroom. I ended up getting the flu partially because of that). All the teachers are fabulous. It’s the head faculty you have to watch out for.

Art teacher is not supportive of student work, our son reported many times that he made some artwork but the teacher(s) did not ever praise him. As a parent of a 7th grader, we have found the school has way too much reliance on computers/chromebooks. Also, in Spanish the students are often given lists to memorize, instead of integrating the information. There is little attention given to the most important aspect of a language: conversation. Surprised in the past three years at how the school uses tired traditional teaching methods, instead of more innovative and dynamic approaches. Will not have son return next year.

This place is absolutely terrible!! Send your child to a public school instead!

don’t send ur kids, horrible athletics, and they’ve run the school into the ground

My daughter has been at OCA since VPK. When she finished VPK, she could read. Now she's in second grade. Her GPA is 4.00 and she's always excelled on national tests. On the negative side, I think they're sometimes disorganized and don't have a good, engaging program for gifted children.