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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]We left for the suburbs for schools.  There are some good public elementary schools and a handful of good public high schools.  But I understand it's incredibly challenging to get into the best schools if they aren't your neighborhood school (high property costs) or your test scores aren't high enough.  Plus, you may get your kid into a school ten miles away and then it's up to you to get your kid there and back.  No thanks.

There are good privates in the city, but other than parochial schools, they're often pretty exclusive and costly.

There are tons of Chicago suburbs with good schools.

And property costs are much less than in D.C.  [/quote]

Typically, I disagree with most assessments of Chicago from people who moved to the suburbs but I pretty much agree with this. There are definitely *some* good schools, and some ok schools. Most people I know who went with CPS in my neighborhood are happy (none go to the neighborhood school but OOF the commutes can be a real crapshoot. Imagine needing to commute across town in terrible traffic to drop your kid off, and then back into downtown for work. No thank you.

I only have an elementary aged kid and a preschooler and I loathe "the suburban solution" in principal but I'm not sure what our plan is once we hit middle and high school. [/quote]

If you did look into suburbs, which would you considering and why? I’m looking and am a little surprised at how far away the closest suburbs are. [/quote]  I'm the "left the suburbs for schools" PP.

I'm mostly familiar with the suburbs north of the city.  Following the Lake north of the city:  Evanston is quite diverse, beautiful housing stock, liberal, and some very good schools.  It has some of the positives and negatives of a city, but you know what schools you're getting.  Amazing farmer's market, and Northwestern is right there.  Going north, next you're in Wilmette, which is far less diverse than Evanston and is in the New Trier school district.  It's a well-regarded district, loads of history, and housing gets less costly the further you get away from the lake.  Wilmette is the most diverse, and least expensive New Trier feeder suburb.  The next three New Trier suburbs are Kenilworth, Winnetka, and Glencoe.  The first two are quite expensive.  Any further north and you're a good distance from the city.

I currently live in Glenview, which is west of Wilmette.  Because it's not on the lake, it's far less costly. But I can be at Lake Michigan in 12 minutes.  And I'm five minutes from the highway downtown, which means I'm all the way downtown in 25 minutes if there's no traffic.  I work in the Loop and it's an hour door-to-door on the Metra commuter rail.  We picked Glenview because of the good schools, proximity to the city, relative diversity, and cost of housing.  I have half an acre in a lovely established neighborhood with huge oak trees and probably paid $200k less than if I were a mile closer to the lake (oh, and the lot would be half the size).  I have a Whole Foods five minutes away and Costco is under ten.  Our library, community center, and village services are wonderful.  Village employees generally really seem to like their jobs.  Things are set up for families and that makes life less stressful.

There are loads of other suburbs with good schools north and northwest (Northbrook, Highland Park, Vernon Hills, Buffalo Grove), but you can quickly get really far out.  A PP mentioned Park Ridge, which is a great suburb and relatively easy for commuting to the city.  We excluded it because the highway it's on (the Kennedy) is terribly congested and we didn't want to put up barriers to getting downtown. But it has good schools and housing.  And there are great suburbs with great schools in other areas, but I'm not familiar (people like Hinsdale, Western Springs, LaGrange and others).  [/quote]

Thank you for all this info! We are considering moving to the Chicago area and had really only been looking at Evanston, but there isn’t a lot of real estate there. I’m also interested in Wilmette and Glenview. Half the family is East Asian, so I’ve been looking at demographics and decided we couldn’t be in any of the western closer suburbs because the Asian population is like 1-2%! Seems like the north suburbs I’m looking at would be good because there seems to be a decent Asian population and Asian markets between there and Chicago itself (markets and big swathes of pop in Niles, Albany Park, for example).

Oak Park seems lovely but I’m not sure I could deal with the uncertainly of CPS. And there’s no Asian markets![/quote]

Oak park is what I’d consider... but my husband works at the t of Chicago so we couldn’t tolerate a northside suburb.

Oak park isn’t CPS btw and it has its own school district. All the Asian markets would be to the west in places like Naperville.[/quote]

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