Welcome to Our Town, Home of “A-Rated” Schools

Yeah, OK. So you move to a new area. What do you do first? Well, if you have kids, you check out the school district.

When we moved to our current home, we were DINKs (Double Income, No Kids). “Good school” wasn’t an immediate factor, but we did know that the schools in our area were rated very high.

A year after moving in, we had Becca. Fours years later, we got our very own elementary school (three miles from our house).

Then we got the shocking news. Kids from out-of-area were being bused in.

And just like that, the school was overcrowded.

Four years later, (when Becca was starting third grade), they moved us to another school (further away from us than the first one).

Then they started busing kids in to THAT school. (And it was also soon filled to capacity.)

Now they’ve built a third elementary school. (Didn’t really matter to us any more, because by the end of fourth grade, Becca was being homeschooled.)

But for the other kids in our neighborhood, it meant being shuffled from one school to the next. (Four elementary schools in all.)

We fought it…all the shuffling around. And the being pushed out of your “neighborhood” school because we had to make room for kids from two towns over.

I sat in on school board meetings. I spoke. I was silenced.

We didn’t get any satisfaction. (And from what I understand, our boundaries are still shifting and moving. And people are STILL unhappy.)

But I was told that since our area wasn’t a “real town” (exact words of one school board member), that we really couldn’t complain. It wasn’t our right.

We don’t even rate our own middle school.

You take what you can get, I guess.

I’m so glad my child goes to an “A” school. The one right here at home, where there's stability and predictability…