Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: "Good" schools and urban cohousing.

[Katie Hymans (haikaili]

I can only speak for our specific situation, but it hasn't been much of an
issue here. In part because folks tend to move in before their kids are in
school. But also in part because the neighborhood school concept is so
destroyed at this point that most people are driving all over the place to
where their kids go to school. We live on the edge of our city, at the
border of a neighboring town (a suburb, I guess). The suburb has the
reputation of 'good' schools, but there are many of us here who absolutely
won't send our kids to that district, for a variety of reasons, because our
measure of 'good' is wildly different from theirs. (i.e. The test scores in
the suburban district are higher, but the teachers are un-unionized, there
is very little diversity, the district utterly prides itself on its
conservative values to the point of discriminatory rules that require a
threat from the ACLU to put a halt to, etc.) There is an elementary school
two blocks from us in the 'good' district, and none of the kids who live
here go there. Our website boasts proximity to the 'good' school district,
but only a handful of kids who live here are in that district. The rest of
us do the application for a work-based transfer (i.e. a parent's workplace
is within the urban school district) and take our kids to one of those
schools (admittedly, many here to various charters within the district).

So I think it depends on the rules within your school district about the
need to live in the neighborhood where the schools are.

~ Katie
Fresno, CA

On Wed, Feb 15, 2017 at 9:16 AM, John Richmond <johnrichmond50 [at] hotmail.com>
wrote:

>
> Hi everyone - last night in a land search committee meeting we had
> something of a side discussion on what we think of the importance of "good"
> public schools in the zone where we finally select our site. Our
> conventional wisdom has been that "good" public schools are essential to
> our goal of a multigenerational community. They are seen as the only way to
> attract and keep families who have children of various ages.
>
> One of our members pointed out a well-founded belief that few families
> will uproot their kids from their existing schools to live in cohousing, no
> matter how "good" the schools where we build are. Her thought is that we
> will mostly attract homeschoolers, private school kids l, and refugees from
> "bad" public schools.
>
> The struggles of urban and some rural schools in the US are well-noted -
>
> How have the surrounding school districts or school zones influenced the
> number of kids you have in your communities over time?
>
> (As a teacher I've come to believe that "good" schools are mostly defined
> by easily measurable metrics of varying objectivity, including test scores,
> graduation rates, percent of teachers with advanced degrees, suspension
> rates, etc. This ignores the idea that some schools that do poorly on these
> measures may actually be doing more with the kids that come in their doors
> than the "good" schools are.)
>
> John Richmond
> Richmond Cohousing VA
>
>
>
> Sent from my MetroPCS 4G LTE Android device
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