Saint Raphael School

My experience at St. Raphael has been a great one! The teachers are great, the activities are fun, and the specials like music and gym are also fun.

Freshly remodeled catholic church. They have an excellent fish fry on Fridays through lent.

I love your school.

This is not a positive review. Keep in mind, I'm speaking about my experience over 20 years ago, and things could have changed (I hope they have):

The teachers were usually kind, but they were generally not highly qualified. They showed a lot of television shows and videos, and academics were poor. Sports were a main focus of students. I was grossly underprepared for high school, and I believe that factored into the employee turnover when I was in the upper/middle school (7th and 8th grade).

One example: We had a math teacher leave mid-year, and the person who came into the position was not even certified to teach mathematics (she had a reading certificate). Although parents complained about her practices, nothing changed. I dropped from As in Algebra to a lower level math class since I started to fail. By today's standards, I would have been considered gifted in mathematics (I know this from reviewing my old Iowa Basics results). I always did the homework, received no feedback, and understood the concepts after I received test results (generally bad), but by then it didn't matter.

A second example: Our reading teacher assigned more pages of grammar worksheets than literary reading. I was able to achieve high grades (often working with other students) when I could barely functionally read. This would be immediately caught and addressed with the Ohio testing system in public schools, today.

While I would hope educational practices changed, it is worth pointing out that only one principal had to manage a K-8 building at the time; that would be the job of two to three people in a comparable public school. Last I heard, they had similar ratios.

Finally, the religious education was subpar: I attended a Catholic High School following my years at St. Raphael's - there, I learned what I had not learned at St. Raphael's school/church/confirmation classes. I was shocked at how much we were not taught in eight years of religious classes - they were typically the content you would expect for elementary kids, and we never really discussed deeper theological matters. The main reason that his is disconcerting is that about 97% of our eighth grade class received their Confirmation. One student did not (who was, literally, chased around the room by a lady sprinkling holy water at him and yelling that he needed to get the devil out of him); needless to say, they pressured that student all year to comply. In hindsight, I should not have been Confirmed at the time since I truly did not understand what was being asked of me. it felt very much like a show.

Please understand, this is not a commentary on the Catholic faith or the church - it is specifically an evaluation of the concepts we were taught in religious studies. I