School shopping? Read this

You may not know this if you don’t have a child in school or ready to start school in Charlotte, but late fall and early winter – i.e. now – is prime hunting season for schools.

For weeks parents of children who’ll start kindergarten August 2007 have been touring different Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools to help them decide where to enroll their kids. Regularly assigned school? Magnet school?

Despite what some people say, CMS offers some excellent schools, including many highly regarded and wildly popular magnet schools. Some of its regular schools are so highly sought after they affect housing prices in their attendance zones.

But some CMS schools are clearly troubled. How do parents, especially people new to Charlotte, learn which is which? Just asking real estate agents or people you happen to run into doesn’t guarantee you’ll get anything close to accurate information. I keep hearing about real estate agents who wave people away from CMS altogether. That may not be doing their clients any favors, if you consider the costs of private school tuition, or of commuting in from outlying counties.

Any careful parent, even those not new to Charlotte, will have questions, such as:

– Which magnet programs are so popular your chances of winning a seat in the lottery are small?

– Are there some strong, but “undiscovered” magnet programs where your chances of getting a seat are good?

– Which schools have strong principals?

– How much weight should I put on a school’s test scores, alone? (Answer: Look beyond simple numbers. One example I’m familiar with: Language immersion students typically don’t do so hot in reading on third-grade tests, but by fifth grade their scores rise significantly.) Here's a link with a lot of test scores (though the latest are 2004-05).

I’ve recently had an e-mail exchange with someone who’s moving to Charlotte and is trying to figure out where to place her child for next year. He’ll be a third-grader. I’ve helped at open house tours at our daughter’s magnet program (where she attended K-8) and I know how eager parents are for first-hand information about a school or magnet program, even when they’ve done prodigious amounts of research.

So it occurred to me that my blog-readers might be a resource for parents looking at schools.

Put your questions/comments about specific schools below.

Here’s some of what I told my e-mail correspondent about choosing a school in CMS.

Whatever elementary school you choose – there are a bunch of really excellent ones – also look ahead to middle and high school. Even if you go with a magnet program, you want to make sure your house is in the attendance zone for good middle and high schools. Myers Park High is the premiere high (OK, so I’m biased), though parents at Providence would probably fight me on that. Other good high schools include South Meck, the northern high schools (North Meck, Hopewell, etc.) Ardrey Kell High in the south is brand new, but the attendance zone is affluent so it’ll probably have great test scores. Butler and East Meck also have good reputations, especially East Meck’s International Baccalaureate magnet program. And Northwest School of the Arts magnet – (grades 6-12) has a devoted following.

Middle schools: the Alexander Graham (a.k.a. “AG”) Middle School is fabulous. Lots of Observer folks send their kids to Piedmont Middle School and rave about it. Davidson IB Middle is great. Randolph IB program is also excellent.

On to elementary schools. There are some excellent and very popular magnet programs. Best bet if you’re looking at mid-year enrollment: Call the school and talk to the principal. Some schools have waiting lists, some don’t.

Reasons you might want magnets: Interesting and enriching programs. Also, stable assignment. The neighborhoods way out at the fringes (Lake Wylie, Steele Creek, Ballantyne, Huntersville, Davidson, etc.) are growing so fast and new schools opening so often they keep having to re-do attendance lines. Many people prefer those far suburban areas because the families are relatively affluent and well-educated and there’s less racial and ethnic diversity, which some people fear (although others relish it). The disadvantage of those areas: schools very crowded, changing assignment zones.

Now, back to the issue at hand, i.e. elementary magnet programs:

– Montessori is very popular.

– Elizabeth Traditional and Myers Park Traditional elementaries are very popular with strong parent support, including parents who could easily send their kids to private schools.

– Language immersion is growing in popularity. It’s a fabulous program, strong principal, good test scores (our daughter was in French immersion so I know more about this than some other magnet programs). Schools: Smith on Tyvola Road is K-8, a countywide magnet for German, Japanese and Chinese, meaning anywhere you live, you can go there, and all middle school immersion kids can go there. K-5 French and Spanish are divided into attendance zones between Smith and Oaklawn. Hard to get into beyond first grade level, though sometimes there’s “late immersion” for older grades.

– Spanish immersion elementary is at Collinswood. It gets great test scores. Principal Maria Petrea is fabulous, wins national recognition, etc. But the school population is about half Hispanic, and this scares off some white parents – go figure.

– Dilworth Elementary: performing arts magnet. Great neighborhood.

– Other, regular elementaries that are popular and well-regarded include (but aren’t limited to): Selwyn, Sharon, Eastover, Cotswold, Beverly Woods (the new super sends his daughter there), Davidson (all those professors’ kids), plus most any of them out in the fast-growing affluent suburban neighborhoods such as McKee Road, Providence Spring, etc.