Chapel Hill Academy

I have 3 children that all attended Prairie View - The teachers are wonderful - This school has a variety of incomes and cultures and it is great to see a school that has a great mix and great students - could ask for a better school setting for my children- very welcoming -

We transferred my child from the immersion school to here. He feels so loved and supported at Cedar Ridge. The teachers really care and Principal Unowsky is an EXEMPLARY instructional leader. And I can say this as someone that works in a school system myself. Their philosophy is to empower children to be their best selves. They address small potential bullying incidents immediately before it turns big. They are proactive in creating supportive classrooms and I gather that they are incredibly supportive of their teachers.

Over the last 10 years, we have had 4 boys attend this school and the last 3 years have been a terrible experience for our middle schoolers. First, many of the teachers do not have teaching degrees and they lack the ability to manage the classroom and the ability to actually teach the material. For example, the LA teacher does not even provide grading rubrics and many A students do really poorly in her class as they do not know the expectations. The Athletic director has made so many mistakes over his tenure that many students have quit playing school sports. One of the lunchroom monitors is so full of disdain for the children that she frequently and angrily approaches kids and yells at them. Even worse is that the administration insists on enforcing an archaic and punitive discipline system that sets children up to fail, especially boys with high energy and/ADHD, which happens to be numerous athletic boys. They are threatening suspension and expulsion, and actually suspending boys who have minor write-ups, nothing major. They do this in the name of mercy and justice, but what they are doing is the exact opposite. They are actually driving our future leaders away from the Catholic faith instead of learning how to deal with high energy teenagers, which such techniques are readily available to them.

We sent our kids to St. John's because we supported the Catholic Montessori style. But after nearly a decade of our family being part of this community we had no choice but to pull them midyear.Our children often brought up concerns to staff but were consistently dismissed or ignored with little to no follow through. Over time our kids stopped speaking up, having learned it fell on deaf ears. Discipline was applied inconsistently, with consequences depending on a family's connection to the administration rather than the conduct itself.When our special needs daughter was physically attacked by a younger student, the student was shielded from consequences outlined in the school's own handbook. The moral environment among students was not consistently in line with Catholic teaching and conduct was often not addressed.We were loyal to this school through a lot and tried out best to make things work. Sadly, it just continued to get worse.