Testimonials
IVA teachers help me understand my work. Instead of telling me what I did wrong, they help me explain my own mistakes.
IVA ensures that all students reache their full potential & beyond. Thank you for ALL you do for our students!
My child feels valued and connected at IVA. Her connection with teachers is very helpful to her growing confidence.
This school has shown me that they are here to support my child holistically and that we chose the right school.
The teachers at IVA create a sense of wonder and curiosity in the classroom.
Teachers at IVA are accepting, kind, and flexible, and they can really help students understand topics.
I love the sense of kindness and community at IVA. This has helped our daughter grow in confidence and maturity.
Rigorous Yet Supportive
Our mission is at the heart of everything we do: To foster meaningful growth in intellectual character virtues in a thoughtful, challenging, and supportive academic environment. IVA teachers are trained to grow students into deep thinkers and learners and to develops habits of mind that will last a lifetime. Students regularly report that IVA classes push them to greater curiosity and deeper thinking.
Caring and Small Class Sizes
While neighboring schools have up to 35 students per class, IVA has only 26 per class. This smaller class size allows our caring staff to know each student well and give individual support and attention to every student. IVA students never get lost in the shuffle of a large school system.
Athletics and Extracurriculars
IVA students participate in the LBUSD Middle School Athletics program which includes flag-football, volleyball, soccer, basketball, track-and-field, and cross country. We also offer free after-school programming each day until 4:30pm, including options to participate in our jazz band, theatre group, our chorus, and life skills classes.
Commitment to Equity
IVA's study body is in the top 6% of most diverse middle schools in all of Los Angeles County. We are committed to an anti-bias agenda that celebrates diversity, we actively seek students and staff of diverse backgrounds, we intentionally prepare and train staff for ongoing self-reflection on matters of race, and we empower students to ask and seek answers to difficult questions.
Research Partnerships and Critical Acclaim
Education experts agree that our intellectual virtues model of education is to be admired. New York Times bestselling author Jonathan Haidt has said that "prestigious universities should admit more students who have attended schools like IVA that teach intellectual virtues". Several researchers have studied and praised our model of education, including USC's Mary Helen Immordino-Yang and LMU's Jason Baehr. Leaders at UC Irvine were so impressed by our intellectual virtues model that they started their own university wide Anteater Virtues project. We are proud of and humbled by the warm reception our school has received from broader academia.
Impressive Results
While we are very intentional to not focus on state test scores as the end all be all of education, our student's results are nonetheless quite impressive. We regularly outpace the state and county average in math, ELA, and science, and our scores are among the top 3 in the district each and every year. We invite you to visit our CA Dashboard and our GreatSchools profile for a deeper dive into some of our accomplishments.
