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[quote=Anonymous]Ha! I grew up in Hanover, NH. The only people who could afford to live in Hanover, NH and Norwich, VT (we shared most of middle and high school) were white collar professionals. Very high cost of living and in those areas really only met by tenured professors, doctors, with a few exceptions.

[quote=Anonymous]I was raised in a competitive, UMC suburb but lived in a house that just squeaked into the school district because of weird boundaries and grandfathering in of formerly unincorporated areas when fancy subdivisions were built. So I experienced it as an outsider socioeconomically and it wasn’t great.

Now I live in a city school district but in an exclusive neighborhood. The majority of kids in the neighborhood attend the zoned school or a nearby private school. My child attends the private school as a way to escape the bubble. It is so much more socioeconomically and racially diverse. It still isn’t perfect, but my DD does an extracurricular activity that pulls girls from all over the region of all backgrounds so she is getting a very different childhood than many of her classmates or neighbors.

We also have a home in a more rural area. We briefly considered the move, but unfortunately the area has one public k-12 with graduating classes of less than 10 kids. Most of those children do not go to college and the school pulls from a vast geographic area. It went far beyond simpler lifestyle and not so competitive to straight up hardship and economic and educational poverty.

I went to Dartmouth for med school, and a book came out a while ago about Norwich, VT (town adjacent to Hanover NH) called Norwich: One Tiny Vermont Town’s Secret to Excellence and Happiness. I was quite taken with it because I had lived in Norwich and loved the idea of raising children in an environment that creates excellence without cutthroat competition. Except that the reality described in the book didn’t quite match the real experience. Most of the families who were able to take a low-key approach to academics and extracurriculars there had so, so much existing privilege, wealth, or education. And ultimately they were still going along with the rat race, just in a really different setting and opportunities slightly out of the mainstream.
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