Carter's Valley Elementary

All three of my children have attended at least one year in this school, and are the fourth generation of my family there. When I was there, it was an average to good school, with the possibility of excellence, if it had been better funded. Over the years, it has slipped terribly, with the focus on teacher retention and test scores over student learning and development. The school has been forced by the county to outgrow its location, with two wings added on, pushing the building out into surrounding wetlands and leaving two temporary buildings that were placed when my now-18-year-old was a student in constant standing water. The gym was built when I was in 3d grade, and is too small for the current student body, as well as being in poor repair. With the depth of focus on teacher retention, students are blamed for every fault, with no options for changing classrooms or adjusting the class environment if there is a poor personality fit, as happened with my youngest child. She entered as a reading kindergartener in August, excited to go to school and ready to learn. After dealing with days in which she spent as much as 2 1/2 HOURS in the "Time Out Room" where she was sent to do busywork when her class was learning, and was left out of activities regularly because she was too lively for her teacher to handle, I pulled her out of school and am homeschooling her -- as a single parent. I had her examined for ADHD by a child psychologist, who told me that my child was within perfectly normal behavior and activity levels. She also told me that she had a LOT of kids from Carters Valley, that the problem was the school, and that if she had elementary age kids in Hawkins County, she would send them to Mount Carmel. Carters Valley Elementary seems to have a tendency to leave its kids behind.