Valley Crossing Elementary

If you have children that go here be prepared for the principal to send numerous emails with the belief that caps lock is the cruise control for cool.

If this school has high test scores, it's because Gateway (for gifted kids) is located in the school and those kids need high scores to be admitted to the program. The school scores are artificially inflated because of this. This school has a few positives, for instance they try harder to differentiate instruction for math and reading for advanced kids than other schools, but overall I can't recommend it, esp. for special needs kids. I feel bad stating this because at first, I had a high opinion of this school. But as soon as we started asking too many questions, and my child was old enough to be able to explain what actually went on there, it all went downhill. We found the special ed instruction to be extremely poor, and my student made no progress (despite the fake progress reports and meetings stating there was progress) but this seems to be a district problem, with many kids being dumped into a "resource room" for "services" with very little specialized instruction. But an additional problem in this school was that the leadership was also unresponsive and unhelpful and I saw little effort to communicate or improve things. There is a toxic atmosphere. The staff seem to have very little supervision, so if you have a problem with a teacher, good luck getting it resolved. The leadership, both in this school and the district office, is very rigid and parent input is ignored. I think 1/2 of my questions/emails were totally ignored our last year at this school. We needed a disability advocate to attend meetings with us because people would not listen otherwise. The special ed services were so bad I asked for the IEP to be removed...it did more harm than good. I know at least one other parent who felt the same way and actually removed her child mid-year, but most parents are unaware that the meetings and services are a sham.