Madison Elementary School

The teachers are fantastic, caring and hardworking. We've been at this school for 6 years and have seen many changes. Unless the status quo is working, they are constantly trying to improve. Every year I see and hear about small changes in the way they teach reading, math, social skills or how to enforce discipline. From our experience, we have one daughter who excelled at reading and was challenged by her teacher. Our other daughter had difficulty reading and was not improving like her classmates. She was pulled out of her classroom during reading to work with a small group of children with a reading specialist. The reading specialist met with us and had concrete goals that were updated every 6 weeks. After a few months she was back at a reading level with her classmates. The best part was our daughter loved being pulled out of class to read extra.
Another great change is having 35 minutes each day when all grades have WIN (what I need). This allows all teachers (PE, music, art, social workers, reading and math specialists etc) to be available to teach smaller groups of children. For example if your child needs a challenge in math, they would move to a different room and get an accelerated math lesson. I look at this time as a combination of a a gifted program, tutoring, and extra elective time.
Some negatives of the school are it is almost at full capacity. The music room had to be used for a classroom, so it went through changes of music on a cart that would travel to each classroom, to using the stage for the music room to this year making part of the library/media center smaller to use for music. Evening school functions are very crowded. The no junk food policy is enforced very strictly...no treats for birthdays, Valentines Day and no more pizza parties.