Gaspar de Portola Middle School

I attended this school for all 3 years, and now go to Taft High School. I only liked 6^th grade because the teachers were very nice and eager to help you succeed.
On the other hand, the 7^th and 8^th grade teachers are horrible. Most of them don’t even care about helping students learn. I do NOT recommend enlisting your children in Ms. Oneill for 7^th grade World History, all she does is yell at her class and send everybody to the dean.
In 8^th grade I only liked my teacher Mr. Kinney for English. He is very nice and helps you learn. I recommend enlisting your children in his class. Do NOT get Mr. Bakenhus, the most discriminating science teacher and doesn’t care about his students.
I recommend signing up for the AVID/​Eager elective in 7−8^th grade as I did. It helps you learn about college prep and you do a lot of toy drives/​food drives for the holidays. Shoutout to Mrs. Hirsch! Love her she’s the best she helped me want to join the military and police force! :)

My daughter is in 6^th grade and loves it! She is excited every morning to go to school. I love the school because the teachers make themselves very assessable to the parents. The staff is friendly and the young adults in higher grades are very approachable to both parents and students. I haven’t heard anything about bullying. If we are still in the area when my other kids go into middle school they too will be attending Their middle school years here. Thank you all for making the 2014 – 2015 newcomers (sixth graders) feel at home!!!

This is a great neighborhood school and the magnet program is challenging. Its odd that while it has a library it has no librarian and my daughters «elective» consists of her sitting in a hallway for 40 minutes but I guess budget cuts are to blame.