May 2022 by Des S.
To begin with, I am currently a student here. I've been here since 4th grade, and to be honest, 4th and 5th grade were amazing. The elementary school program is, in my opinion, very good. The teachers were kind and supportive, the curriculum was challenging, and there were never many expectations of diving deep into technology or science or other subjects. We were learning material that would prepare us for more in depth learning in middle school. Unfortunately, the same is not true for junior high for many reasons. My biggest gripe about the entire middle school is the technology. As nearly every student review here mentions, the technological education is nonexistent. You pay 30k a year for some crappy wyse terminals from 2005 (we have picture evidence of this) , chromebooks which are nearly a decade old by now, and a WiFi plan that can only support 3 chrome tabs before lagging out and crashing (this especially impacted covid learning, because so much was online). The only uses for the computers are powerpoint and word 2010. Google docs are strictly forbidden most of the time, and half the apps on your desktop won't even work. Moreover (I used a transition word!), there is no education in one of the largest growing industries--tech. There used to be a computer class where we learned HTML coding, but that was quite literally a class where we practiced copying what the teacher wrote. None of my peers nor myself could fully understand what was being taught, which just ended up wasting time to the point where the class is no longer taught. Their programming elective uses codecademy, which is a FREE service. My second biggest issue is a teacher. One teacher. Our science teacher has stayed remote for the past two years, meaning our seventh and eighth grade science education is nonexistent. Last year, we never once did a lab in class for biology. This year, for physics, our labs involved rolling marbles against a ruler, weighing a piece of candy, and watching water boil. These labs are designed for third graders, and the answers to them exist online. Sometimes during our quizzes, he will give everyone the answer for free. He even uses class time to babysit his daughters. For these two years, four periods out of our week have been wasted in a science class that has not taught anything new. No one pays attention in class, which I admit is not the teacher's fault necessarily, but the teacher should be IN PERSON. And the administration is fully aware of this, yet still does nothing. Countless parents have sent complaint emails to the admins, and they are just brushed off. It seems as if their attitude is that "you've give us your money already, why should we care?" They are fully aware of the lack of a science education, and they still let the problem persist for two years, depriving us of a needed science education. But, and this is the reason for a two star review, the teachers for the most part are amazing. Besides this one teacher, everyone else truly cares about students. They keep us engaged in their classroom, offer challenging courses and material, and help us in every way succeed. This brings me to my third point, which is that the admins are terrible at maintaining order. Most of the kids at DE are modestly well behaved, but there is always a handful of bad kids that everyone is aware of. Whenever something goes wrong, it is pretty easy to assume that one of these three or so kids caused it. So, they should be the ones punished, right? NOPE. Instead of figuring out who exactly did something wrong, the administration's response to everything is to yell at the entire class and punish the ENTIRE class, most of whom are innocent. To me, this just shows a lack of care and laziness, because they can't even be bothered to figure out exactly who caused trouble. Overall, if you want a "good" education, you might consider DES, but in my opinion, there are so many better options, even public school. DE offers a good standard curriculum for the most part, but that's it. They do
