Reply to Moving to Arlington or Fairfax Country - Question re being near metro in good high school district

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=whatshername]Thank you all so much for your replies - this is really all very helpful.

I'm a little familiar with Arlington, but not with Fairfax, and we would consider both areas.  I wish I could find a "street map" that showed where exactly the metro runs.  Right now if I see a street address, I have to Google how far it is from a metro stop.  I have seen metro maps, but they don't have street names on them.  (Am I making sense?)  The goal was to be able to walk a half mile to the metro and avoid driving ... in either school district.   We had not considered commute time on the metro however as was wisely pointed out.  In an ideal world a commute time of 30 minutes or less would be wonderful, but "ideal" might also be "impossible".  It seems we will have to decide what is more important - length of metro commute or school district.

[b]What people say here about Yorktown vs. Washington-Lee is interesting.  On "paper" (ie in schooldigger dot com), Yorktown is shown to be a better school - perhaps one cannot judge completely by that though.  I did not know WL had an IB program.[/b]

To answer some other questions, yes I stay home.  Oh and the 1.75 did refer to bathrooms - I meant we'd prefer one and 3/4 bath house, three bedroom.  A "tear down" on a small lot is just fine.  We'd prefer a stand alone small house as opposed to a town home or condo.

I maybe should also clarify that even though I have been mentioning high schools, oldest child is actually still a toddler.  I just find it easier to start looking at housing areas by the high school and then work my way down to the elementary schools.  One can have a good elementary school in a so-so high school district, but usually good high school districts have pretty good feeder schools.  Perhaps I should also clarify that we will be renting for awhile (once we arrive in VA) and making a decision about buying after we rent ... right now I'd like to get started (soon) at looking at different areas to scope things out.

I read with interest the discussion between Arlington and Fairfax schools.  We have not decided on that yet either.  I am more familiar with the Arlington area, and still need to visit the area where the Fairfax school district is.  I understand there is "city" and "county" school districts and it seems the country school district is better.

The last time I was in Arlington I did see a 1100 square foot house near-ish to Courthouse metro for around one million three hundred thousand.  Thus I assume that being close to the metro and also close to DC drives up property value.  That same house in Kansas (we are not from Kansas) might sell for $50,000 lol.  (I laugh so as not to cry.)[/quote]

The GreatSchools/SchoolDigger scores definitely need to be taken with a grain of salt.  They are more reflective of the income profile of the surrounding neighborhood and diversity (or lack thereof) in the school population than anything else.  Yes, W-L gets a lower rating than Yorktown.  That seems to be mainly because Yorktown is more universally high-income, most of the area zoned to it is expensive single-family homes.  W-L has a significant low-income population but also a substantial high-income population plus, as a PP noted, it attracts high-achieving kids from across the county for the IB program.  It's just a much more diverse school. Lower income and immigrant students tend to score lower on the state tests that are the basis of ratings and the GreatSchools algorithm now penalizes schools that have more diverse populations and a test score gap between White/non-White students.  You can look at the actual data on the Virginia Dept of Ed web site and run reports for schools among students with your family's profile to see how kids like yours are doing.[/quote]

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