School Daze – Learning more about Westchester Schools…

For many home buyers, one of the biggest considerations is the local school system.  The Westchester school systems are quite well know for their excellence.  But they are also a crazy tangle of  districts overlapping towns and villages. For example, a post office address of Scarsdale can put a home in either the Scarsdale, Edgemont, Eastchester or Yonkers school district. And if that doesn’t give you a migraine, remember that that’s just one post office address.  A good agent can help home buyers navigate this maze.

Where we  can’t be of much help is when buyers ask specifically about the quality of individual schools or  school districts.  I am often in the position of having to say that I can not offer an opinion on this very important issue. Steering laws forbid us from weighing in on issues of this nature.

So this post is geared to helping home buyers help themselves by offering a series of suggestions and links. There are couple of great sites  sites devoted to schools and school districts.

The first is GreatSchools.org. This site has been around a long time, has a great deal of information, and better still, its free.  They do have a lot of test score data which I caution against using as a sole criteria.

The second is Niche.com. You can get one free month and then you pay for the privilege, but it still has some interesting facts that come for free.

Home buyers should not reject a school system based solely on scores. Scores often reflect the affluence of an area more than they do the actual quality of the school system. I wrote about this in a previous blog about the  “The Great School Debate“. A great way to start is by looking at the district web sites to get a feel for what the district offers. Below are links to the home pages of most of the school districts in Westchester.  The municipalities that they serve is in the second column.  Please note that these are towns and cities and not the associated villages. Full disclosure, I may have missed one or two – its a big county and its got a lot of districts!  Of course, the best way to judge a school system is by turning off your computer and visiting the schools in person.  This may sound very time-consuming. But rest assured,  it is well worth the effort.

Hopefully, this will help point parents in the right direction and save them some time on the search engines.  

Happy house hunting!

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