North Davis Preparatory Academy

My kids went to NDPA from kinder through 7th grade. They take their Spanish and science programs seriously there. They win state and international awards almost every year. Half of the teachers are from Spain, and kids switch halfway through the day to get taught math and other stuff completely in Spanish. My girls are fluent in Spanish and the teachers at NDPA pushed them to excel. They push hard for parent volunteers, but it's not obligatory. I volunteered every week when my girls were in kinder through 3rd grade and that helped me get to know the teachers and the culture. My only complaints are that the junior high doesn't have a band or orchestra and that it didn't look like students with behavior problems had their classroom in the elementary school. They are just in the same class as all the other kids which can be distracting. I don't know if they just don't have special education there or how they handle that. Everything else about this school is amazing.

This school has great! teachers for Spanish they come all the way from Spain and it's really good for learning. I've learned a lot more from ndpa than at my old public school. I like the uniforms cause they're not distracting or anything. The teachers have great comunicatiom with my parents. When there's a test coming up they're emailed. And we also celebrate like how Spain would celebrate thing in our Spanish class.

There are two areas that I have found to be worse than the other schools my children have attended. 1) Little to no teacher parent communication. At this school there are parent "class captains". These class captains send out all email communication from the teacher. Parents literally have no one-on-one direct communication from the teacher on a weekly basis at all. It is all done through a parent intermediary. At schools my children have attended in the past , I always had weekly (sometimes daily) emails from the teachers and I felt like I could always contact my teacher and knew what was going on in the classroom. In this school, I have felt completely out of the loop on all four of my children's classes. In addition, your children have two teachers, and only one class captain that is sometimes shared with other classes, so you have no communication even with a parent who is in your child's class. I don't understand why the teachers cannot just write an email to the parents instead of writing an email to the class captains to then write to the rest of the parents. 2) HUGE class sizes. All of my children are in classes with over 28+ children. The teacher of one of my children's classes just told me that she has 10 ADHD kids in her and only two are medicated. This I feel is unfair to not only the students, but also the teacher. Huge classrooms with imbalanced needs of kids ends up hurting learning. NDPA needs to know better. I can't believe my children are in classrooms where they can't learn to their highest potential due to an administration that refuses to adequately balance classrooms and hiring.

We e love e this school. Opportunities for our son to excel academically abound because teachers work to develop individual programs for the students as needed. The Spain study program is an incredible opportunity for the students, (and much less expensive than some other programs I've seen). Volunteer hours are required, but there are a lot of parents who do MUCH MUCH more than the minimum required. Students are learning that it takes a lot to be a citizen of today's world, and NDPA is giving them the tools to succeed. And the faculty and administration are as close as your email.eee

The former parent is absolutely right about this school. There is no discipline. The students swear at each other and teachers without any fear of consequences. If a student gets hit by another student, they're on their own. The administration needs to grow a backbone. Parents are moving their students from the school because of this. Not safe.

The management in this school is a joke. Since the secondary building was open, the principal told me how hard a time she has to manage both buildings. I actually saw a fight between a teacher and a parent outside, and the cops had to come and separate them. Not a very happy environment.