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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Anyone thinking about the suburbs?[/quote]

As someone who did this and recently moved back to the city: don't, at least not for elementary.

A good suburban elementary school is in no way an upgrade academics-wise over a good city one, particularly with the class size law making city schools competitive on that count - if you don't believe me, go to https://data.nysed.gov and compare the report cards for a Westchester suburb you like with those from a top zoned elementary like say PS267. And in terms of culture and diversity and generally having a rich full life there's just no comparison. The coolest, most interesting kids we met in the suburbs were the ones who had stayed in the city until late elementary or middle school.

Some random school problems we had to deal with in the suburbs:
- Outdated curricula and a stubborn insistence on sticking with them; they were hell-bent on Calkins right up until the state made them stop and they weren't even doing a very good job applying Calkins (kids were being strictly limited in what books they were allowed to read based on a 1-minute reading-out-loud assessment)
- Extremely hit-or-miss teachers, a problem exacerbated by real estate - no young teacher could afford to live near us so they were all commuting an hour every morning - and seniority; a bunch of crappy teachers were un-fireable due to both their length of service and the fact that they had too many fans in the older generation of town residents from when they were better teachers; they also kept shedding good teachers who got frustrated with them, particularly in hard-to-replace specialties like foreign languages and strings
- Refusal to invest in building maintenance, so we kept losing school days due to flooding or lighting strikes; we lost both the use of the library for half a year and many of the books in that library in a bad thunderstorm
- Town board of finance constantly making random last-minute cuts to the school budget, so programs would start up one year and vanish another because they were moving things around to try to fix them, and they'd be randomly stingy - math team switches from grades 3-5 to 4-5 because they didn't want to pay the extra few hundred bucks for some slightly different league for the 3rd graders, teachers don't have extra copies of worksheets because they only have precisely this many and aren't supposed to copy them, Box-Factory-esque field trips, etc.
- Faculty members publicly beefing with the superintendent; we had a middle school history teacher who was for whatever reason fanatically opposed to the idea of instructional coaching, swayed enough of the board of finance to his point of view that they tried to get the board of education to cut it, and when they refused, included the cost of coaching in one of those aforementioned last-minute cuts. (he also ended up getting his wife onto the board of education, who doesn't seem to have done much except make various futile attempts to cut the coaching budget and then quit in frustration after 2 years)
- Various school functions outsourced to nepotistic SAHMs; for example, there was no official elementary/middle school theater program but there was a separate nonprofit that used school facilities to put on shows and showed consistent favoritism in casting towards the children of board members.
- Obsession with tutoring even for kids who didn't need it (as discussed here elsewhere recently), which meant lots of pressure on the kids who didn't use tutors because everybody was always bragging on being 2 points higher than everyone else on MAP tests.
- Many of the worst aspects of private school culture, like ultra-rich popular kids all hanging out in the same ski/beach towns together - my daughter discovered she had been shunned by that group when she arrived at sleepaway camp and found out that the two 'popular' friends who had persuaded her to go to that camp had changed their cabin requests to exclude her.
- Lots of little racist incidents - Swastikas in bathrooms, 'build the wall' chants at sporting events against more diverse towns back in Trump 1, people making absolutely unhinged posts (publicly, under their own names) whenever the idea of building more diverse housing stock to attract a wider variety of residents came up...

Granted a lot of these are also problems in the city - including random budget cuts a few years ago (thanks Eric Adams) and of course lots of uptown PTA nonsense - but not this many, and not all at once, and in the city they're to some extent easier to escape because you're not trapped in a small town with a bunch of crazy people.[/quote]

Some of these seem applicable to just the district you were in, while others are more general about the suburbs - your extremely lengthy post would have been a lot more meaningful if you differentiated between the two. Would you mind saying what town this is? Or at a minimum, what county?[/quote]

To be fair, this is pretty much the norm at any well funded, highly rated suburban public. One can quibble with the details. People aren’t stupid for paying for HM when they live in northern NJ or Westchester. That 70k is to avoid the problems the poster mentioned and for many who are HNW it is worth it. [/quote]

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