Honest Answers about Schools and Crime (Atlanta, Alpharetta: house, neighborhoods, buy)

[jln69]

We will be moving to areas either within Northview, Chatahoochee and some Alpharetta HS districts. I know that on paper the schools are performing well for GA standards. Are there any drugs in the schools and how are the teachers? Where we live now in the Raleigh area schools are doing comparable on paper but there are alot of drugs in the schools and I feel that the teachers just are not motivated and do not want to help the kids succceed. I feel that they are not as passionate about their jobs as when we lived in Mass. There weren't as many drugs either.

How is the neighborhood crime in some of these areas as well. Right now we are in an affluent area but there is alot of crime in the neighborhood. Cars getting broken into, homes being burglarized, people stealing things out of garages, golf carts getting stolen etc. And the weirdest thing of all it is happening from kids in the neighborhood and surrounding neighborhoods as well. We didn't have any of this in Mass except for a few kids ringing doorbells and then taking off.

Honest opinions please. This won't deter us from moving to the area. We just want to be prepared. We like living in the South. We are used to the warmer weather, you can have more home and it is more laid back.

We have been to the area several times. My husband travels alot and works from home when he is not traveling. His company is based in MA and GA and they would like him to have an office in either place. We like where we are living now it is just he is feeling the pressure majorly now to have in office. We would like to stay in the South rather than move back to MA for reasons stated above.

I would just like to know if Atlanta has these same issues as well so we can be prepared. There is just so much going on behind the scenes that one can't tell until they move.

Thanks.

[GF72]

There is extremely little crime in those three school districts. When I say extremely little I mean well under half of the national average and many, many times less than the city limits of Atlanta.

The vast majority of kids in that area are well-educated and also liberal (but not in the silly hippie way). There are some kids who smoke marijuana but there is no place in the country where you can escape that and honestly, who cares. As far as the bad drugs go, in those areas it's definitely not a problem. Now, in a school of 2500 high school students obviously there are some who do drugs, but the overall percentage is very small.

As far as teenage crime goes.... that's a pretty laughable thought. Kids from those schools don't do anything worse than maybe blasting their car stereos.

That area has some of the best kids in metro Atlanta pretty much. You picked a good area. There are a lot of high-achieving, successful students in the area. Each year over 70 students from Northview High go to Georgia Tech after graduating - the majority of schools in the state of Georgia have none or at most one or two students that even get accepted to Georgia Tech. Westminster Schools, a pricey and prestigious private school in Atlanta that has an endowment of over $200,000,000 (the largest endowment of any private school in the entire country), by comparison, sent a whopping 9 students to Georgia Tech last year. And not because Westminster students went to Ivy League schools or anything either (Northview also sends more students to the Ivies).

You won't have a problem with those schools and the area. Those schools even better than what you see on paper because of the community involvement and quality of education.

[Philagirl]

I live in Northview School District. If you ask any parent or student what the best thing is about their school, nine times out of ten they will tell you it's the teachers.

They are outstanding in every way.

Not only are they intelligent and skilled, but they find innovative ways to present the material to the kids, and they make every effort to accommodate a child's individual learning style. The teachers love their jobs, and the kids they teach, and go over and beyond the call of duty. My Kindergartner reads at a third grade level. We were worried that she'd be ignored in the classroom because the teacher would be spending time teaching the other kids how to read. Instead, her teacher told me that she's working on getting my daughter to write sentences at the same level that she reads. I thought this was wonderful.

Our elementary school principal is also outstanding. He knows all of the kids' names and does his best to personally greet as many of them as he can when they come in in the morning!

I was recently at a Newcomer's Tea at my daughter's elementary school. Half of the parents had sent their kids the year before to private schools in the metro-area, and decided instead to move to Northview School District. They were very pleased with their decision. Many other parents had moved from states with outstanding public schools, and yet they were blown away by the education they were getting from Northview schools. (And I know parents in the Chattahoochee, Alpharetta, and Milton school disticts who feel the same way.)

I don't know about drugs... My kids are really young. Every school has some drugs, but I've never heard of a drug problem at any of the schools you are looking at.

Best of luck to you. I don't think you can go wrong.

[jln69]

Thanks for the responses.

Philagirl. What elementary school do your children attend that you like so much? Do they redistrict schools here? Where I live now they are constantly doing that. I'd hate to have my heart set on one school only to find out that they would have to leave and attend another. Where I live I have to tell my clients not to fall in love with the school when they buy a house because it might change.

[TheFuzz]

There's more drugs in wealthier areas of metro-Atlanta than the poorer areas. The most popular drug of choice for a high school student is still alcohol and marijuana, but there is also more abuse of hard drugs (cocaine, meth, heroine, ecstasy, and prescription meds). The reason for this is that rich kids can afford the more expensive drugs.

Now for crime, those areas have less crime than a lot of areas in metro-Atlanta. One easy way to tell if there is a lot of crime is to look at the graduation rates in the high schools. The higher the graduation rates, usually the lower the crime.

[Philagirl]

My daughter goes to Shakerag.

There are a lot of people moving to the area, so there are new schools being built all the time. So yes, this is an issue -- a school you start out in may not be the school you stay in.

The good news is, the new schools seem to do fairly well. The same, very involved parents who sent their kids to one school, are simply attending another one. Northview High School opened in the fall of 2002, and not long after, became one of the state's best schools.

[lastminutemom]

It is my understanding that they are opening a new high school to relieve Northview in the near future. That said, as philagirl says the new schools are just as good or better than the existing ones. Except when Fulton makes dumb decisions (like splitting a neighborhood or not moving kids that are closer to the new school, etc) you don't hear many complaints about redistricting. It is to be expected almost anywhere in Metro Atlanta though.