Challenger - Harwood

My kid has been attending this school for over 4 years and this is a great elementary school. Easy drop off and pick up without waiting in lines, clean environment, and great teachers who pay attention and report regularly on the progress. Covid time was difficult but school managed to pull through and this year the stage performances and participation in contests have bounced back.The homework is an hour long and manageable. There are tests every week on different subjects keeping the concepts refreshed and even though my kid doesn't enjoy math as much as other subjects, still performs really well. Overall happy with the choice.

in our experience, the first two years of elementary were great with the 2011-14 principal and they had some awesome teachers - two stars for that. But since 2014, after the old principal left and even those teachers no longer worked for Challenger, its been only deteriorating. We lost the interest as the teachers replaced were dishonest, the new principal and the program director incompetent in communication and managing core issues. We are happy to find a much better public school than Harwood where we paid tuition for their internal problems and incompetence to resolve it effectively. Please avoid enrolling in this campus, save your kids, time, energy and of course, money!!

Sharing our most recent 4th grade experience on this campus. A general observation about Challenger's method of education is the emphasis on memorization, rather than knowledge. Cramming curriculum with content from higher grades and lack of real teaching, does not raise the bar at all - you breed students with shallow depth yet seemingly good at reciting the memorized information.How do they teach Science? The teacher reads out content from a binder and writes notes on the board. Students copy the notes into their notebooks. Occasionally they will have demonstrations in class - one day the teacher brought pieces of sponge of varying sizes, and dipped each one in water, showing that the bigger sponge had more absorption than the smaller piece. On another occasion she got different types of rocks to show them to the class (but didn't feel it necessary to pass them around for students to see closely or touch). This is the quality of so-called science demonstrations - really lame. Compare and contrast to a public school (Guadalupe Elem) where groups of students themselves built a roller coaster track in the class using card paper and tape, as an experiment to learn about potential and kinetic energy. In Challenger, the same topic was only read out by the teacher from a binder and wrote notes on the board. Think again - in which environment will kids enjoy learning science ? (my daughter recently changed from Challenger to our public school and we are finding that in many ways, the public school is better). The public school had a field trip to Monterey Bay aquarium to learn about ocean's ecosystem too.I also want to clear up any myths about the science fair in Challenger - this is an exhibit of individual experiments done by students and their parents - teachers do not teach or contribute anything in this.You pay so much money to put your kids to Challenger to raise the bar, but your kids are not enjoying to learn and are only becoming good at memorization.History - again, teacher reads American history from her binder and writes notes on board, that students copy. Teacher will not bother to explain concepts such as tax, governance, etc. When you see words such as "entrepreneurship" in your kids' notes, be assured they have no clue what it means.Math, English are ok. Arts and PE are a joke. Overall, incompetent staff and especially bad management.

This is one of the worst campus. They terminated our enrollment because they couldn't resolve the bullying situation where the bully was challenger staff's daughter. When I approached her as mom she complained as challenger staff rather than amicably resolving the situation with me. When we escalated the matter to the regional director he directed that our daughter can retaliate if she chooses to and the situation be left with the kids to deal with while I should never contact the bullying child's mom. They assured us that I should step back for 3 months and trust them that situation will resolve, to which we agreed. But the fourth grade teacher disagreed as she was against retaliation and the whole situation became aggressive in last three months with increasing incidents that our daughter came home with. When I visited the class after three months, it was pathetic to see the teacher yelling at kids for petty reasons like going to each other's desk for art time while she neglected the bullying. When I approached her requesting about what was directed to us by the regional director and to set up a parent teacher conference to discuss the situation, she complained the principal that I was confronting with a raised voice in front of students!!! Such a lie and disrespect towards parents. The principal without having a word with us, left a voicemail for termination of enrollment with immediate effect!! They can tolerate bullying, name calling, treat kids like robots but cannot make a fair judgement when their own staff misuse their teacher policies to show power against parents!!! Please make a right choice while enrolling your child further to save from these incompetent bunch of liars and bad values.

I use to be a student here, and everything was great and all (little sports), but then I wonder, where are the foreign languages?