Lavilla School Of The Arts

If you child loves art this is not the school for you. It is unfortunate that the 7th and 8th grade visual arts students can't even make A/B honor roll because of one teacher. If your child is making anything above an F in visual arts they are doing really well. I wish I had listened to all the warnings from other parents.

Awful school, awful staff, my daughter struggles so much with her confidence since attending this school.

Overall the experience was good with the exception of a few poor teachers. The biggest problem has been the fear of one teacher. Just seeing him in the hall or hearing him demeaning or disciplining other students while in another classroom scares my daughter.

1.) The staff and faculty do not exert any effort to communicate with the parents, even if the parent is regularly at the school volunteering, and bringing and picking student from campus on a daily basis. I was not notified of my child's progress until report cards were out. The many websites that the parents had to log on to for each class were never updated with current grades. 2.) A child cannot learn actual computations if there is no paper and pencil involved. The math homework on the computer is ridiculous. With this there is a long, useless story involved where the student cannot fast forward to the problems. If the student makes a mistake on one problem then he/she has to start from the beginning. Bring back paper, pencil, and real instructors to teach these basic math courses. My child's math teachers did not teach.3.) My child's 7th grade language arts instructor could not speak to me regarding progress. This instructor apparently is always too busy concentrating on her other teaching job at FSCJ. She had no time to speak or communicate with a worried parent, ever. The teacher also graded harshly. To test her, I asked a college professor (her colleague at FSCJ) to write a paper in APA form, in lieu of my child writing it. This 7th grade middle school teacher gave it a C. She must have not read it at all because the paper was so good that it could have been published. 4.) My child had a total of 4-5 different science teachers in 6th and 7th grade. All the students suffered because of these changes. Homework and classwork was lost. Notebooks that were required for the classes and bought by the parents were taken by the former science teacher and not returned. All grades and efforts by the students were lost with these notebooks. 5.) My older two children previously attended Duval county magnet schools. This school's academics is not up to par compared with the other schools. I blame it on the academic instructors. In contrast, the arts programs at LaVilla gave the children great opportunities in an important factor of real life; competition and creative thinking. Art students are extremely smart and have different cognitive abilities than "non-art" individuals. Their abilities and thinking are wonderfully supported and accepted as a whole by the supporters at this school.