What criteria did you use to determine whether your local school(s) are good or not? What resources did you look at, and who did you talk to?
If you're going private, how did you determine that you wanted to be at that school?
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Our situation is probably quite different from most people's. We live in a country where neither of us speak the local language, so we are choosing a private school where they speak one of our mother tongues.
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I checked online ranking systems (dont remember the websites) for our state. Our district is consistently #1 so I stopped research there. It's public though and i dont know how to research private schools.
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@honeybear: If you are looking at public schools, state and national testing scores are public information, and some googling usually gets you those scores.
I would advise against weighing the Great Schools website rating too high--sometimes those scores are misleading, since a handful of bad reviews from disgruntled parents can really skew scores.
For private schools, usually you can find average SAT scores (for high schools), and then you typically have to evaulate the schools by word-of-mouth from other parents, from taking tours, from seeing what price range tuition you can afford and asking questions about curriculum--plus, private schools have their own admissions process, so they have to select your child--and that process my narrow your choices down a bit.
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Once we narrowed down the city we wanted to live in I went online to the school district's site. From there I knew which schools had current A ratings and a history of A ratings. Then, as my realtor sent us homes to review I just checked to make sure the A schools were the neighborhood's feeder school.
Well kept and decked out rec facilities were also important to me. The city we live in has really great parks, aquatic facility, and community rec center.
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We used great schools with a dash of skepticism.
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@Anagram: Thanks for the detailed response! That was helpful.
@lamariniere: I can imagine that it's a totally different situation outside the U.S!
@Mrs. Lemon-Lime: I agree that public parks/rec areas make a huge difference in quality of life. I ranked public parks highly in selecting a place to live.
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6 comments