Ridge and Valley Charter School

As can be seen by the test scores, this school continues to have severe problems educating children to the standards that other children in surrounding schools are meeting. The school uses check marks instead of a standard  grading system.  Parents do not get realistic feedback, and then they see their children do poorly on standarized tests.  There are other items that hurt the educational process at the school.  There are no elections for the individuals that run the school, the trustees are appointed by the vote of other trustees - a group of friends bringing in other friends.  I strongly advise you to use this site, other educational sites, and review blogs before deciding on which school to send your child to.  Informational sites, such as education.com, can help you make informed decisions.  I wish they had this site when our family was considering where to send our child.

ConcernedUSParent: This school's approach has not met the educational needs of my child, and clearly many other children based on this web site's (www.education.com), the (schooldigger.com) web site, and several other websites that now report on school testing information. Things many parents find good about the school: 1) small class size (105 students currently in the school), 2) somewhat selective, 3) fairly homogeneous group of children with little diversity (other area schools have high percentages of minorities), 4) no A,B,C... grading system in order to protect the psyche of children and parents, 5) no set structure, such as english will be five times a week at this time, and math will meet at this times on these days... 5) lot's of "classroom leading" or teaching done by parents, 6) very enthusiastic teachers 7) a lot of parent involvement from a core group of parents. Unfortunately, because of the lack of structure, lack of expectations, and a lack of concern regarding the core content areas, our children are not able to perform well on the NJ Ask and the GEPA testing, as can be seen on the results of this website. In addition to spending more time on core content areas and ensuring mastery within those areas, the school needs provide more realistic feedback so parents do not think their children are doing great, and then watch them get clobbered on the end of year testing.  In 2008, this school ranked 1234th out of 1264 schools in NJ.  In 2009 the school ranked 955th out of 1259 schools in NJ.  It appears the school did not report enough testing to be ranked in 2010.  In 2011, the school ranked 1047th out of 1248 schools in NJ.  I wish I had this website to review information  before I placed my child in this school.  Consider yourself lucky to have this website and make an informed decision with some objective data.

I love this school. Children are treated as individuals, and the guides( teachers) provide learning experiences for each child. RVCS is mre than a school is it a community.