Reviews

This is a review coming from a former worker at ASV. Do what you will with this information.

Where do I start? I guess I'll start with the few things that are good about the school. All of the teachers are very qualified people and want what's best for the students. I would also say the level of english is quite good here.

Now, for the stuff you really want to hear. They did make smaller class sizes for COVID, which was beneficial on their end. Now that cases have dropped, class sizes are back to normal averaging at about the high twenties. This high number is not conducive for anyone's learning, and also unfair to the parents who are paying good money for a more individualized private school education. They say that they have teacher assistants and help from the learning support teachers which is great in theory. In practice, the teacher assistants are often performing lunch or park duties, substituting, teaching other classes, and are too busy for their assigned classes. Learning support teachers are also spread quite thin between classes. Additionally, these large classes persist in middle school and high school with little to no support. How do you expect students to learn under these conditions?

Additionally, they use the failing Lucy Calkins workshop curriculum that has been criticized by many academics as ineffective. There are articles about this in several platforms such as the New York Times and Forbes magazine. Feel free to read these critiques to inform yourself. As someone who has taught this curriculum in and out of ASV, this curriculum is simply not user friendly for students whose second language is english or have different learning needs. Considering both of these populations make up a significant portion of the student body, this is quite problematic. The math curriculum that they use is also quite dry and leaves little room for creativity.

This school often hires and lets go of teachers. While there are a few teachers that have been there for quite some time, the constant recycling of teachers is not helpful for building strong student relationships. Sometimes teachers leave because they go back to their home countries or are looking for another international working experience. A lot of the times teachers leave because they are let go without a clear reason as to why they were let go, or because of the working conditions. Teachers have lack of sufficient prep time, loss of breaks, and shortened lunch times. These are not working conditions that set teachers up for success in order to set students in large class sizes up for success.