Pros
Staff are friendly, but overly stressed and tired. No time to plan.
Cons
There is a lot of yelling from teachers to students, threats to students to take away recess, or delay lunch. Students are given sugar bribes for good behavior. Kindergarten students do not have PE, and they don't have a recess until 12:30pm and lunch at 1pm. That's very late for five year olds. Coloring worksheets or color by number sheets were all that the children really did all day at their desks. No centers for hands on or sensory learning. Kindergarten students were falling asleep by 2:30pm due to lack of sensory stimulation. First grade teacher yelled at students so loud and so often that I almost wanted to cry. There is no school library or librarian, no art, music, or theater classes in the academy. This school is void of any creative outlets for students. It feels like a factory. In both kindergarten and first grade classrooms there were no lesson plans ready for me to follow as a sub. I asked if I could teach a phonics lesson and read a story because there was no lesson plan and the other teacher said "Oh, they won't let you do that here." In the AR lab first grade students spend 90 minutes reading a few AR books then taking a test on the computer, then there is nothing left for them to do. The teacher had students sit on the carpet and promised to read a story outloud but then never read a book to the students. For 15 minutes these students just sat on a carpet doing nothing. Just talking to each other. This is the worst education I have seen in my 15 years of teaching. No higher level or critical thinking skills are practiced here. Kindergarten had 32 children in the class. Too many.