James Madison High School

I went to Madison and liked it a lot. OK, so it wasn't yesterday, but I doubt much has changed as "Coach Link" is still there, now the athletic director but when I went there he ran the weight room, coached football, and had to work nights @ Magruder's to make ends meet. I had a lot of good teachers, a few great, one or two a bit crazy but not everyone is normal. (A certain english teach comes to mind, she seemed to think that she could NOT call in sick as class was too important and apparently a sub couldn't do her job properly. After she gave 1/2 the class her horrible cold, she finally took a day off. :=) Yeah, she was weird but still a good teacher.

I played lacrosse there for 3 years and it was an awesome experience with a lot of great coaches, several of which were Hopkins grads. We won districts and barely lost to Robinson for the regional championship. My 6th-12 grade teammate Rich Hodge is now the head coach and they had an excellent year this year. Shoot, even the Gate brothers came to our practice several times as "the Canuck" played indoor ball with them on the Washington Wave.

I also did tech for theatre building sets and doing sound and we had an awesome teacher, Mr Summers. 3 of 4 years I attended we won the state championship for forensics, and I'll never forget stuffing 800 people in a 720 seat auditorium for the last night of Grease. We even managed to get a ratty MGB on stage! My favorite play was Little Shop of Horrors where we rented the plant props from Broadway and built a 40' revolving stage with fly in wings.

I can't think of anything bad to say about Madison except for the 6am start time for 2 a day lax practice at the beginning of the season. Sure it helped but I was TIRED at dinner! It seems to have outgrown it's property with a few mobile classrooms in the rear parking lot but necessity is the mother of invention. As long as they kept the student/teacher ratio ~the same, that's "the price of progress."

Incredible education in a small town environment.

So good place for teaching and learning

This public high school is certainly one of the best in the nation, although its very large size and culture diversity are challenges the school has yet to solve.

A fantastic environment. The students are all super enthuisastic and ready to lend a hand

One of the few best highschools in the NoVa area.

Great school , I love it

The art teachers are all spectacular. I've spent my 10th, 11th, and 12th grades here. The school does not handle teacher absences very well. Last year a geosystems teacher left because she had a baby, she would not return. The person they hired to fill in was a military guy on paid leave..I think... who didn't know how to teach or know anything about geosystems. Halfway through the year he was fired for multiple allegations of being a creeper towards the students (buying girls things from Victoria's Secret and stuff.) Unfortunately the teacher he was filling in for was the head of the geosystems department and in her absence the curriculum fell to pieces and there was no order in what was being taught and what was on the test. Now I move on to another bad thing still in relation, the administrators. They're all nice and stuff but... I talked to my counselor (very good counselor, Tonya Lathom) and she took notes on the issues with the geosystems department and handed them over to the geosystems department counselor head and he did the worst possible thing. He didn't talk to the teacher who self assumed the role of geosystems head but GAVE him the notes on what was going wrong. Epic fail. This was the teacher that was creating the problems. I was also told that some admins would sit in on our classes (they're supposed to do this for all classes at least once a month, but they don't) and they never ended up doing so. My counselor ended up sending me to talk to the vice principal.... *facepalm*. I told him what was going on at the school, and you know what he did with the information? He made more of a issue for everyone for the next school year. Perfect. Overall this school has poor administrators, poor security, poor structure, and poor organization.

Run down mess with some decent teachers. However, for every schedule you are bound to have 2 bad teachers which the administration does nothing about. If this is one of the best high schools in fairfax county I'd hate to see what other schools are like.

If I could give this school 0 stars, I would. The security team in this school is full of two faced criminals who turn a blind eye if you are on any sports teams for the school. Punks patrol the hallways skipping class and everyone acts like this is normal. You get zero attention unless you win a game for the school. Completely mob rule