[Esh13]

Hi all,
I know this question has been asked and even answered a few times on here. Most of the posts are years old so you never know if anything has changed, plus it's always good to get some new fresh points of view if anybody has any to offer .
My husband was laid off from his job of TEN years here in the Atlanta area. That's a lifetime almost for us. We moved here with our three young boys when we were 27 and we are 37 now. Now two of my boys are in high school, one will be graduating in a couple months. My youngest is in Middle school but again, only for a couple months then he's off to high school.
I hate that we have to relocate before they can at least finish out this year but that's our only option. My poor senior won't be graduating with the class he's been with for the last 10 years.

My oldest son is brilliant, just a genius. He taking many AP classes but has yet to take the end of the year test. I am really hoping that the school he attends will offer all of these AP classes so he can learn the last bit of material and be able to successively take the tests.

I am debating against Hillcrest and Northridge. It seems Hillcrest gets the better scores, at least on greatschools.org it got a very rare for Alabama high schools, 8 out of 10. Northridge I'm reading good stuff about as well, just not necessarily on that particular site.

If anybody has any particular opinion on one over the other I would really appreciate hearing it. This is really big for us. We all feel pretty lost. We've never been to Tuscaloosa before but after much research it looks like the best city in reasonable driving distance from where my husbands job is actually located in UnionTown, AL. NO way we could live there.

Please help with anything you could. Any advice would be greatly appreciated.
Does anybody know of a website that shows an actual map of the school districts so when we nail down a school we can be sure to look for houses in that area.
This will all be happening pretty quick, within the next two to three weeks.
We are going down for a quick over night trip this weekend to take a look around the city and maybe look at a few rentals I saw online.
If anybody has any ideas on a nice rental house that would be great too. We would prefer a 4 bedroom but aren't seeing many of those in the area, so a big three bedroom could be ok.We like the Northport area but I'm still confused. That is the Northridge High area right?
We can spend about 1200 a month on rent.
Thank you in advance.

[ttownfeen]

First, there are two school districts in Tuscaloosa County - Tuscaloosa City Schools and Tuscaloosa County Schools. City Schools covers the city of Tuscaloosa; everything else in County Schools. Northridge is a city school - city schools have a continuing problem with suburban flight and in the process of trying to recover from the past problems has a convoluted districting system, but as a general rule, in order to be zoned for Northridge, you should be north of the Black Warrior River. Northport is a different city - it's covered by the County Schools (specifically Tuscaloosa County HS or Sispey Valley HS, depending on where you live in N'port). Hillcrest is a County School. Hillcrest schools covers the southern part of the county - the zone actually goes all the way to the Hale County line.

Second, since you want to live in Tuscaloosa and work in Uniontown (50 miles south), it would recommend you look in the southern part of the Hillcrest school zone (along State Highway 69 South). There is a continuous string of subdivisions and community along 69 from Tuscaloosa to Moundville (and part of Moundville is in Tuscaloosa County).