[eddyscot]

What's Newtown like? How are the schools? Community? Proximity to LGA? Any help would be greatly appreciated?

[jdhall1]

Newtown is a semi-rural/suburban town in eastern Fairfield county CT. It does have a small town sort of feel, despite a population of about 25,000 over about a 60 square mile area. The town has some horse farms, a few small commerical centers (grocery store, bank and few other businesses) so most people drive about 15 minutes into Danbury to most of their shopping (clothes, electronics, cars, etc). The community is family oriented. To promote the atmosphere of family, the town has numberous fields offering playgrounds,swimming, tennis, softball, baseball, volleyball, lacrosse and soccer. For more passive recreation, there is a nature center, lots of walking trails and a portion of a state park. The town cherishes its past and has 10 sites on the national register of historic places.

The schools in Newtown are excellent. 100% of the normal students and 84% of special students met the NCLB standard in math and 97% of normal and /55% special students met the standard in reading. In addition to that, 70% of 10th graders met the state goal of excellence in math; 66.7% in reading; and 73.8% in writing. The students did well on the SATs. The mean math school was 534 (up 5 pts from previous year and the verbal mean of the class of 2005 was 530 (the same as before). The percentage of students scoring above 600 increased from 23 to 27% on the verbal test and 27 to 35% on the math test. These scores are above the mean of 517 on both sections of the test.

Newtown is within a reasonable distance of within both LGA & JFK, but it is actually closer to fly out of Bradley International outside of Hartford. LaGuidara can be range from 70-85 minutes, depending on what area in Newtown which you could live in and traffic as you approach the city. Add about 10-15 minutes more to JFK. It took me about 50 minutes to get to Bradley once I got the main exit for Newtown ( I live 10 minutes west of Newtown via I-84).

The average home this year has sold for $586,000, which is about $10,000 below the typical sale value in the county. The average is a little bit higher than I would have expected it to be but I attribute that to some of the new, higher end homes that have been built. There are a lot of great values in the market as the market slows down from the rapid increases over the last 5 years.