Notre Dame High School

L-​O-​V-​E Notre Dame. Couldn’t have imagined what a positive high school experience our daughter would have here. So blessed to be in this caring community!

I loved that my hs was in the heart of downtown sj. Instructors really cared about my performance and I made friends for life. None better!

Notre Dame… I was once so proud to attend this institution. However, the excitement surrounding a new school has faded, and as this haze is being lifted, I’ve come to the realization that ND isn’t the golden sunflower field it claims to be. I will note that the humanities and math departments at ND are quite strong. If you have plans on becoming a social worker, teacher, writer… ND may be the place for you! With that said, the science department is not up to par. I bear a warning to all aspiring engineers: attend ND if you’d like. Yes, you’ll still get a good education. Yes, you’ll be more aware of social justice issues. Yes, you’ll be able to be on a winning robotics team. BUT, you will NOT find yourself engaged in one of the most important STEM classes– physics.
The physics department here has seen better days. For the last three years, not a single physics teacher has stayed for an entire school year. The last few teachers have been figureheads who are in place simply for the sake of being there. You will learn all material on your own. Fortunately this does not apply to the majority of the classes… But BEWARE!!! On the positive side, there is an intro to engineering course which I hear is MUCH better than our dismal physics classes.

Principal Mary Beth Riley has done a great job of managing Notre Dame of San Jose and fulfilling their mantra «Women of Impact» based on all the awards she has received on behalf of her work at Notre Dame.
The history of Notre Dame goes way back to when San Jose was a frontier town and the school was one of California’s first colleges for women. When the college moved to Belmont the high school moved to the O’Connor Mansion, a wonderful couple that built the O’Connor hospital. While the mansion was torned down to make room for the fancy new building the school has done a good job of leveraging downtown as an extension of their campus. School plays are held in the professional theatres, the robot team practices out of the Tech Shop, the swim team and water polo teams play at San Jose State’s pool and the track team practices at Bellarmine.
If you are looking at an all girls school Notre Dame is worth checking out, just make sure you don’t get it confused with the other two Notre Dame all girl High Schools (Belmont and Salinas). Cross town rival Presentation competes for the top girl picks, but both schools will give your daughter a great education and are good counterparts to the all boys Bellarmine school. Tuition is $ 16k and financial assistance is given for those in need.

Great experience, there’s many anecdotes about this high school. Let’s say go try be friendly be responsible you have the doors open.

Sometimes when a prep school is situated in an urban environment it may be perceived as grimy, second class and not up to par to schools in the burbs. Do not judge a book by its cover and know this is a fine institution.
Just outside the heart of downtown San Jose, NDSJ is a solid all girls Catholic prep school. It is on the smaller side so if you prefer a more intimate learning environment then you’ll want to give this heavy consideration.
I find their senior service project one of the stand out components of their curriculum. Both reflective and academic, it provides a powerful experience for these young ladies to put into action what they’ve learned during their time at NDSJ.

I graduated from ND in the mid 90’s. My favorite part of the day was lunch, other than that my time there pretty much sucked. The teachers weren’t that great except for my Spanish 1 teacher Ms. Geoffrion Vinci, and my senior English teacher Ms. Lochman. The other instructors only cared about the high achieving, honors students. If you were average academically, then you were invisible to them. Lord forbid that you decided to attend a community college. That was like heresy. The college counselor at that time was Peggy Hock. Before that it was Ms. Barretto. Neither of them were very helpful or encouraging if you were not an honors student with a high GPA. Notice a theme? As you probably figured by reading my review, I was one of those academically average students that attended community college. I don’t regret my decision to do that. Eventually I transferred to a university and got a BS Degree. Two good things about ND, the workload makes college seem easy and a uniform makes getting ready in the morning a breeze.

What to say about my Alma Mater? Let’s just say I picked this school based on its proximity to the ice rink since at the time I was a competitive figure skater (hey, I was only 13 at the time when I made that decision… better than Pres, right?). Don’t get me wrong, I am grateful for the education I received there, but really, at that time many of the departments were not so well run. For one, the Mathematics department was SEVERELY lacking good instructors. I remember my Geometry teacher expected the class to do her job and teach ourselves the material. How is that possible when we don’t know anything about the subject, hence why we are in that class. Also, my senior year, one of the math professors decides to have an important review session before Spring finals, knowing that Seniors were required to be elsewhere for graduation prep that day.
Hopefully that Math department has been spruced up since then. I also hope the school has finally been able to deal with plagiarism and students that blatantly cheat and get away with it. My graduating class, it was well known that the salutatorian cheated on her school work and exams. Yeah, I still can’t let that one go.
The English department was excellent, as was History, Law and Science. My favourite English teacher is still there, Miss Orr.
There are cool things to do off campus nearby, but sorry, you can’t leave campus during lunch or your free period. You aren’t even allowed to leave for the day at lunch if you have 7^th and 8^th periods free (if you’re lucky enough to have both those two periods free as a Senior).
I wish they would stop asking me for money. I don’t have any to give!

i am also biased because i attended this school from 99 – 02! I loved the uniforms, and not having to pick out ur cloths, the campus and the atmosphere was welcoming and warm.
I think they did an amazing job at proving opportunities for the young ladies to flourish, everything from sports to leadership to choir!
I had an awesome experience with all my teachers there, nothing to horrifying.
I would send my daughter here in a heart beat!
and i think the review from Chris T is not a legit review, he’s a guy ! he can’t possible review an all girl school based on a visit for SAT’s and Mixers he attended,
yeeeeeah how about no?!

Some classes were lame. Friends I met there were the best and still keep in touch with them. Spirit Week was fun. Being there as a freshman sucked but from there on, every year got better and better. I miss wearing uniforms because it’s so hard to decide what to wear everyday now. At Notre Dame, everyone was able to wear the same thing every day and nobody would know unless you got a stain.
You get detentions for doing ANYTHING geez. You can’t look up Harry Potter scarves in the library and you cannot have boxers shown from under your skirt by accident, something random like socks over the knees aren’t allowed, walking off campus and going back on campus after school isn’t allowed…
We’d have to go to mass as a whole school together. Mass felt like a performance since there were liturgical dancers. I was in GSL class and one of the options of helping out the liturgy was to be a liturgical dancer. Thank goodness I didn’t get picked to do that. Phew.

Eh.

some of the worst years of my life,

Of course I am bias I went here to High School for 4 years and loved most (not all) of the teachers. One of the teachers I’ll let remain nameless was crass and rude. She had graduated from standford and when I got a bad grade in her class, she said to me «what are you thinking of going to standford or something». Needless to say that experience ruined my perception of her and the school. We made amends later on but I swear that woman had it out for me.
I know people say you’ve got to either be crazy or a lesbian to like all girls school but you know what I really enjoyed my education here. It was a great place for me to learn to be me. I mean of course we all had our awkward stages in life, but hey there is no better place than Notre Dame.
Oh and now I hear my french teacher is the principal even better! I’m not sure who out there is looking for a Catholic High School but I highly recommend this place.
I do however miss the Mansion that was there before. If you haven’t heard the story of the Mansion you haven’t spent time at Notre Dame. Now it’s a beautifulo new building. Sadddd!