How to find out what would be the best school system in my area?

Question

Im planning to move within six months or sooner, but I would like to do a permanent move to a town that offers a good school system as well as security for my nine years old daughter, any advice on how to get this information?

Answer 1

Look at their school ratings online.  Each school will list how well their students did in standardized test and check with the police department for security.

Answer 2

Check out the website greatschools.net. It has a lot of useful info and it makes it easy to compare different schools.

Answer 3

We have moved across country several times for my hubbies work.  I feel your pain.  The best thing that I have found is to first look up the local chamber of commerce for the area that you are moving to.  Most all of those sites will list demographics which is a great place to start to choose an area to live in.  So that will narrow it down to specific towns for you, then you can look up the schools for that area and they each should either have a site that you can look at their individual school demographics and if not then call the school and ask for a copy, or where you can find it online, of their accountability reports.  That report will list demographics for that school.  Demographics meaning... how the town or school is split up by ethinic background, the amount of reported violent crimes, drug usage, kid on kid violence, student on teacher violence.. etc.  Then it also breaks down where the school stands as far as their curriculem goes.

The other tip off, and we learned this when we moved to Nevada, is to check with the county or towns chamber of commerce as to how many students in that area attend private schools or charter schools and are homeschooled.  We have more students in NV that fall into those categories because all the public schools here are below standard compared to the rest of the country... needless to say our kids only attended a month of public school here and were put in private school.

That is another consideration is to check out the cost of private schools in the area you are thinking about.  Here in NV it is actually cheaper to put your kid in private school than day care because they are competative because of how many kids don't attend public school.

Anyway, I hope this helps some.  Good Luck on your move!!!