How Are We Choosing A School District?
This has been a learning process. What we’ve been doing is plugging every house that we come across into SchoolandHousing.com, which gives you the API score of the elementary, middle and high schools assigned to that address; we’re really only focusing on the elementary schools, because that gives us a lot of time to make a change if need be. If the score is too low, I don’t even bother looking at the house. If the score is very high, the house is an automatic possibility because we’d be willing to compromise on quite a lot for a truly great school. If the score is in the middle range, I do some more intensive research into the assigned school (because of course there are lots of other factors to consider besides test scores) before deciding whether to view the house.
Two more resources I’ve been using to cross-check schools: GreatSchools.org, which gives you a rating based on parent and student-submitted reviews (so it’s highly subjective, but still helpful) and SchoolDigger.com, which provides information on demographics, student body size, student-teacher ratio, and a lot of other elements that can help you get a fuller picture of what the school is like.
