Conestoga Valley Senior High School

I would highly recommend CV. I know every school, just like every business, has room for improvement, but the education my children have gotten and are getting at CV has prepared them very well for what is to come. If you look at what school really is for - to prepare students for citizenship and functioning in the world - CV has gone above and beyond to do this. My children have participated in TSA, Sports, Drama, TV Studio, and more and I can't say enough about the dedication of the staff and faculty involved with each of these areas. It has helped to shape my children, helped them become more confident in themselves, and even in the times they didn't win the game or things didn't turn out as planned, they were able to regroup and rise to the challenge of the next thing. My son is going to a top tier school and I anticipate my daughter to do the same, so please remember that not everyone who is happy about a school fills these forms out.

If your student aspires to attend a top tier college, I do not recommend starting his/her high school career at Conestoga Valley High School. I have a gifted daughter who is a senior now at CV. She is the only National Merit Scholarship Finalist from CV this year, but no faculty member, certainly not the administration, cares for such a thing. No teacher, except one history teacher, encourages students to study hard and have higher academic standards. There are four guidance counselors in the high school, but they are always too busy to guide students and they don't have enough knowledge about strategies of sending students to top tier colleges and universities. This high school places its emphasis only on sports at the expense of academics. Most of the students thus settle to attend less selective rolling admissions colleges, they do not have higher ambitions. Yes, there is a program for gifted students, called Honors SAGE, but after the principal kicked a very caring gifted ed. teacher out to the middle school, he was replaced by a very unmotivated teacher three years ago so the gifted ed. program has been just empty time for the gifted students. This high school is OK for ordinary, mediocre students but not for high achievers. The high school definitely needs a college counselor.

Mediocre. Perhaps I have no right to complain because at least I have received an adequate education, unlike students in poorer areas who are frankly treated as disposable and fed to the school-to-prison pipeline, but I think a school ought to hold its bar of excellence higher than that. The extracurricular opportunities, with the exception of Model UN and Mock Trial which were run by an outstanding faculty member and gifted education teacher (who unfortunately was not in favor of our principal, who only cares for sports and imposes his conservative values on the student body, and who refused to allow the gifted teacher to continue at this school part-time), are simply hollow and empty. The school, able to muster enough money and fundraisers to revitalize the football field, cannot even provide paper for the school newspaper, resulting in it all but dying out. For this reason I quit as the editor-in-chief, feeling like Sisyphus working meaninglessly. My guidance counselor was a wonderful, compassionate man; however, the guidance department has a limited knowledge when it comes to pursuing a postsecondary education at top-tier colleges. Some of our teachers were absolutely phenomenal and passionate (my calculus teacher this year was one), others are doing their work for a paycheck, and all are subjected to the oppressive specter of standardized testing. In most of my classes, with the exception of AP US History and CHS English, I was bored and insufficiently challenged; one social studies elective teacher even complained to my guidance counselor that I participated too much in her class, even though she could not deny my remarks were germane and furthered class discussion. If you are satisfied with a run-of-the-mill education, do not mind the sexist and homophobic attitude of the administration, and aspire to nothing more than a less or somewhat selective local college after high school, then by all means attend CV. Otherwise, take your brain elsewhere. I for one cannot wait to graduate this spring and attend a college in which my contributions are respected and validated and where I can engage in lively, meaningful, and challenging intellectual discourse. Hopefully other schools treat their custodial staff better than CV did, outsourcing them to a private company and snatching their state benefits out from under them.

My daughter is a gifted student who attended Conestoga Valley up until last year, I finally had enough of banging my head against the wall to get the school to acknowledge her GIEP, and pulled her out last spring and entered a cyber school. Unfortunately the Conestoga Valley School District is still fighting sending her paperwork to the new school. Over 6 months later, and I am still having to call the school to beg for test scores and paperwork to be sent, I know my children were not important when they attended this school, and now that I finally pulled them out and got into a decent and responsive school the difference is amazing. If you have gifted children you would not believe the opportunities that exist for enrichment through the cyber schools, it blows the pathetic attempts by Conestoga Valley away. I no longer have to beg for a yearly conference, the cyber school wants to offer interesting and so far amazing options to my kids.