I'm a former student writing this review, so this is probably the most accurate rating anyone could…read moregive this school. This is going to be a pretty long review, so there's a TLDR at the bottom. Academically, Challenger is great. The curriculum puts students on the same courses as TAG kids in public school, but there is even more homework, which teaches kids discipline, responsibility, and time management at an early age. However, it's important to point out that the homework is not too much, and I found that I was always able to complete it and earn good grades without too much stress.
From kindergarten through fifth grade, I really enjoyed the school since I maintained good marks, and the small class sizes made it easier to make friends. I was also a really well-behaved student, and always found my good behavior rewarded. However, in sixth grade, my parents decided to send me to public school so I would be ready for high school. Despite being in TAG all subjects, my learning pace was slower than it had been in Challenger, so I re-enrolled to Challenger for seventh grade, and this is when everything changed.
There were a lot of new students, and let's just say they didn't find my good behavior too cool. There was a new hierarchy that I soon became aware of, and I was around the bottom of it. That year, my friend group was bullied quite a lot, but what amazed me is that the teachers did literally nothing about it. I also noticed that the front office was very close to the popular kids and basically didn't pay attention to anyone else, so it felt very isolating. I couldn't report the bullying even if I wanted to.
In eighth grade, I wasn't ready to go through that again, so I changed my entire personality. I guess I was now more easy to talk to and funny, so my bullies became some of my closest friends. I even dated one of them. But even though I won the students over, the front office, who didn't see our class every day, thought I was still unpopular, and this would become important later.
Since changing my personality, I was more flexible with following the rules, and one of them was that you can't share food. Basically no one in middle school cared about this, and sharing food was so common that many teachers saw it and didn't make a scene since they knew we could handle our allergies by ourselves at that age. However, at some point, a front office member caught me with the same food as someone else, who was a kid who had always been popular. When he was asked whether the class had been sharing food, he immediately told the truth, but when I was asked, I lied to protect my friend. In hindsight, lying is always wrong, and I shouldn't have done it; instead, I should have admitted it but not said anything about the person who gave me the food. However, since I lied, I had a failing comportment grade, which prevented me from getting the Academic Excellence award even though my grades were literally 96 and above for every subject. I also got lunch detention for two months, which was really severe. The other kid, in contrast, got away absolutely scot-free. This really irked me because previously, there was another problem with sharing food, and the offenders received lunch detention for 2 weeks, so that should have been the punishment for the other kid. However, the front office members, in my opinion, tend to act like teenagers in this regard, since they show so much favoritism that it is blatantly obvious. They basically try to suck up to the popular kids, which is the opposite of how it should be, and I think it's really messed up.
Another consequence for this one negative choice that I made was that I didn't get a scholarship despite my extremely high testing. Just because of my comportment grade, which was affected by one mistake, I missed out on a lot of money. I think they were too harsh with the punishment for sharing food because in all the years except eighth grade, I tried my hardest to be the best-behaved student in the class. I had to change because otherwise, I would be suffocating in bullying for the rest of my Challenger career. And even in eighth grade, I was still one of the better-behaved kids in the class, but I guess my history and everything I put into that school didn't matter to the management.
I know I've claimed that teachers were bystanders to bullying, and the front office was just fueling the flames, but this isn't true for every single individual. Some teachers were terrific, and the same goes with some of the front office staff, but the damage that school gave me is still done.
What you should take away from my story is this: Challenger will be great to put your kid ahead of the competition and prepare them for high school. However, unless your kid has a gift for sucking up, they may not have the most positive experience there.
(The above paragraph is the TLDR btw).