Harvest Christian Academy-Pent - Los Angeles, California - Private School

From: Jackson Rhodes | submitted: Apr 06, 2011
As a graduate of this school, I feel obligated to offer a brief caveat to prospective students and their parents in regards to this particular organization: While it is the hope of many to send their children to a socially healthy and ideal learning environment (and one would hope that a private academy would facilitate such a thing), this school is not much more than a religious daycare center hidden behind the guise of being an educational institution. Students are not so much taught course material as they are simply supervised while left in a room to figure out the various curriculum for themselves. The majority of the staff have poor (if any) formal training or experience in working in the fields of study that they are expected to "teach." (In fact, the "School of Tomorrow" organization that supplies the school's curriculum only requires one week of training for individuals to be granted teaching accreditation.) Let's face it, if any of the authority figures working at this institution actually had any real teaching skill, experience, or ability, they would have a job teaching at a legitimate school and not here. In addition to the unfulfilled wish for a conducive learning environment, part of the reason members of my family and myself were enrolled in this school was because of the hope for a healthy moral surrounding; sadly this was also not entirely achieved. The majority of the ethically questionable behavior by students went unmitigated by the teachers, many of which were either apathetic or simply neglectful towards it. To have seen many of my peers engaging in these types of activities, and many times without any corrective guidance, retrospectively I still find quite reprehensible. At every level I often detected a subtle disregard for the welfare of the students. This is a sentiment which always seemed to be expressed, from those in subservient roles all the way up to those in more administrative positions. (Vice Principle "Sister Patti" being a particularly good example; essentially living proof that there is indeed a certain level of incompetence and insensitivity that takes an entire lifetime to acquire.) If you truly care for your child, there are certainly better places to send them. If you wish them to grow well (educationally, spiritually, or emotionally), there is no reason to sentence them to the type of abject neglect that this school has shown me and so many others.