7809 Ocoee Ct
Raleigh, NC 27612

My family moved from Texas to North Carolina in hopes for a better education and future. Sadly, the schools and the systems here are subpar, at best. If you have children with chronic healthcare and special needs, your children will not be in a safe or inclusive environment. Unfortunately, my children have been the targets of hate and bullying from teachers, admin, staff, and students. If you have the means, choose any other school and/or district. Do not put your children im harms way just to be in a "good" neighborhood.

This school is your average-boring school. It’s really over-crowded, and the bus has about 64, sometimes misbehaving students.clubs are moderately sorta boring, but I guess if you like that type of stuff it will be fun.Teachers can’t really help students in depth since they have about 100 or more. And the homework doesn’t get any lighter. If you have clubs, or stuff you do outside of school, your going to need to be prepped. Because most teachers see assigning homework as a lighting of their work.If your not really like other people in opinions and such, ( ex, you love school, you don’t like using computers much, you don’t like candy,etc.) than you probably should not expect your minority voice to be heard. Most of the time, they go by majority, because for some reason that’s fair I guess. But hey, at least you can always say I told you so for some random situation.To be honest, I don’t think are school is much of a diverse one. A lot of people think that diversity comes in the race of someone, but most of the time it comes from different ideas, expressions, and thoughts. No matter what it be in the form of.Which if we’re are talking about THAT diversity, then we have got close to a drop of it. It’s not so bad though I guess.I’m going to stop complaining , because there are some sorta good stuff about our school.Like, we have classrooms in a pod, which basically means they cut a square out of the hall, and they plop some doors that lead to classrooms on the perimeter of the square. Even though it is easy to navigate, I still dislike it because I like to go through tricky middle school challenges that are not academics, but of course they did that.Sorry, here is some actual good news.They have sort of cool electives, but none of them interest me because I was looking forward to the career path choices one, but of course...never mind.Other good stuff about this school is that a lot of people know your name. Like example a lot kids say,Hi _______!Which is cool, but I hardly know anyone’s names except the names of people I do not talk to.And, I guess we’re like, all a bunch of pre-mature kids inside our hearts, we just don’t like to admit it,But when we do in our actions, it’s a pretty fun time.So kid behind the screen, my one whole-sentence of advice it to speak SOME of your true heart out, because surprisingly, a lot of people think the same thing.

We are new to the area, and our daughter is going to PGES from another zone (the other school is capped). We had no idea what to expect given the not-great ratings, but we have overall been very happy with the school (and the ratings make absolutely no sense to us whatsoever!). Our daughter seeks challenge in school, and her teachers have been great about doing the best they can to help get her there, answer our questions, etc. (Having any support for GT/AIG is new to us, as the district we were in before in another state had zero support for teachers or parents/students in that situation.) The principal is very nice and supportive. Our daughter's teacher has been very kind and helpful in working both with our daughter and with us. My only substantial concern is that there seems to be far too much food-oriented rewarding at the school, which is not universal in the district, but too common from what I have gathered (it's the same for our son's middle school). This is complicated and concerning if there are health or behavioral concerns around food for some children, as we deal with, particularly with no school nurse on the grounds the vast majority of the time (that is a state/district issue). That said, the school is good about working with us when food presents a challenge in school. Overall, we have been as happy in most ways, and in some ways happier, with PGES as we were with our kids' former school (rated an 8). It's been a very good experience overall.