J. Frank Dent Elementary School

Worst school ever my child will not be returning

This school truly doesn't provide the best accomodations and support needed for children with special needs. Administration barely even knows the kids, the kids' names, or close to anything about special education. Severe staffing issues in special education due to lack of support from administration and the turnover rate is only increasing more. Funds for special education are definitely not used properly. This school needs a whole separate wing for the special education programs (Regional Autism, Regional M.O.V.E., and CRI) so the students have everything needed for their educational experience to be successful (to include a home suite to learn life skills such as cooking, cleaning, and doing laundry; laundry rooms with laundry machines to wash student clothing if accidents occur; Adaptive PE room with proper equipment; aquatics pool for students to have their aquatics program; classrooms that ALL have bathrooms in them, etc.).

Attentive to details, alerting parents, courteous in speech and manner, prompt to get children to and from the school building, encouraging the young people, disciplined in practicing civility. Active in all activities in school. They remember every student's name and mannerism. I've never had an issue with my great-grandson while he is going there. They make learning fun, even during COVID. I wanted to learn how to do online learning too.

My daughters went to this school for 2024-25 school year and I have to say this school was 1 of the worst schools my daughters attended. Number 1 was the bus, it either never arrived or was always late. The stop finder app was so useless I just deleted it from my phone. The teachers were not very engaging with their students nor supportive. My daughter was bitten by another student in the past and neither the teacher or nurse contacted me. I had to reach out to the school to get some information as to what happened with my child. Their one excuse was it was a substitute teacher that day. They are not very communicative with their students nor parents or students. My daughters were sent home with a multitude of papers throughout the school year, when I asked them questions or information on some of the papers their response was mostly “they just handed us the papers and said give to your parents”. This school was so horrible I have been counting down the days to the last day of school so my girls can attend a better school this upcoming school year.

Incompetent office staff. Instead of helping us with transferring 3 students to another PG county school, the students were withdrawn/taken out the system. This led to the students missing two weeks from school due to the online registration process and having to call the new school and the district to acquire a parentvue account. Valley View did not give out this information when asked. We were told they could no longer help us but were never advised that online registration was necessary nor that a code was supposed to be given. All they did was print out a few documents(while sitting down and having us reach over to grab them) and told to go to the new school for further help. This experience was unbelievable and could have been prevented if staff was not lazy and had proper knowledge on the process.