Spring Valley Middle School

Holy crap DD, was that an autobiography or a review? Going from a private catholic school to a public school is always a challenge. You can whine about it on Unilocal over a decade later or be an adult and learn from it. I went in the mid-80’s, and it was fine.

Though reviews for SVMS on «rate your educational institution”-type websites are, at best, tepid, I must admit I don’t know how the school is faring now, because I am a former student and it’s been a long time since the last bell rang for me.
My parents made the mistake of believing all the hype about Spring Valley Middle School, which, during the mid-​to-​late nineties, had a reputation as an exemplar of administration, curriculum, and instruction. And, considering what the rest of Spring Valley had to offer in terms of public schools, I can see why SVMS had such buzz surrounding it.
Sure, there were good teachers and good administrators here. Unfortunately, as caring as some – some – of the staff may have been, they were no match for the community riff raff the school served. What I learned from my time at Spring Valley Middle is that no amount of education or empathy can keep up with an army of no-​good child-​gangsters who have nothing but contempt for education and perceived weakness (or human frailty, or just humanity, if you prefer) in their peers.
One must acknowledge, however, that Spring Valley, save for a couple of isolated pockets of lower-​middle class comfort and a swath of affluence on Mt. Helix, is a rough, tough town. Granted, it’s no Euclid, but as far as East County goes, it’s a blemish of a community which has been declining since the installation of cheap housing (and LOTS of it), the entirety of which now amounts to little more than a vast, glorified Hooverville. Perhaps it isn’t the fault of SVMS (established in the late 1950s, arguably before «urban poverty» took root in the area) that it happens to be situated very near the heart of this squalor, and consequently has to deal with all the children who are forced to attend school there simply because of proximity, but one would think that the barbaric behavior that takes place on its campus could have been reigned in somewhat – at least during the years of my attendance.
The result of what I believe to be a lack of vigilance on the part of the administration was that SVMS was more like a prison yard than a school, where, accordingly, factions and gang-​like groups quite often distinguished themselves along racial lines. The bullying was intense, and when you weren’t getting pushed around because of the color of your skin or because your physical appearance didn’t meet the expectations of your peers, you were ostracized and snickered at by those in the tragically hip cliques, many of whose members came from the better-​off corners of Spring Valley. Of course, no one bothered them.
Having transferred from the Catholic school across the street and being somewhat overweight, I was a stranger in a strange land on my first day at Spring Valley Middle, and, of course, an easy target for the scum with whom I would shortly become acquainted. Suffice it to say that this was not an easy transition for me. Every day I was dodging this group or that, or this bully or that, and very seldom getting away. This continued for the duration of my attendance here. I became paranoid and depressed.
I believe that my experience at SVMS, which felt like three years of hell, was nothing less than traumatic. I don’t normally indulge in the histrionics we tend to associate with self-​reflexive psychobabble, but I do believe that my stay there scarred me, as I know it scarred many others, because I wasn’t alone.
Perhaps one of the greatest sins of the faculty, aside from the obvious looking-​the-​other-​way which all too many school figures are guilty of, is the implementation of the «Zero Tolerance» policy, which was something of a fad in the educational system at the time. This policy stipulated that absolutely no student violence would be allowed, and that every act of student violence would be severely punished – no matter what role the student played in the violence. This meant that if a kid walked up to you at lunch, socked you in the jaw, and you hit him back, you were both getting suspended for a week, or worse, regardless of who did what.
As I was a good kid scared to death of getting in trouble, I took this policy to heart. Unfortunately, it was (at least partly) for this reason that I suffered abuse at the hands of fellow students for so long. I was afraid to strike back. There were a few times that I did retaliate and punch an agressor out of anger, and while such actions seemed to mitigate some of my problems, I was suspended after each incident.
But that was a long time ago. If you’re debating sending your child to SVMS, maybe you can hope that because times have changed, the school has changed also, and maybe for the better. But the socioeconomic conditions of the surrounding area it serves have not, and in some ways have grown worse. This may offend some people as insensitive, but having to endure life in this sort of environment tends to throw such sociological, liberal sensibilities out the window.
Anyway, good luck with your decision!