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We are now in HPISD and I say HPISD all the way. We are at Armstrong and MIS which has a lot of people in condos and SFA's and a lot of families who have large multimillion dollar homes. I do not feel that kids are treated differently at all because they live in an apartment or condo. There are a lot of families sacrificing to even afford that. The school and extracurricular activities are far more inclusive than any other school I have seen and people are friendly and welcoming. We could not be happier with the move and we actually don't miss the yard. We chose not to live on Mockingbird of Hillcrest because I worried too much about traffic. The other pro with going with a condo well within your budget is that it will always rent well and you can live there for cheaper than rent while you wait for opportunities to purchase a home or bigger place. Also, the kids all dress so casually that dress is not a marker of rich or poor. Everyone can afford Under Armour and neon soccer shorts.
We are now in HPISD and I say HPISD all the way. We are at Armstrong and MIS which has a lot of people in condos and SFA's and a lot of families who have large multimillion dollar homes. I do not feel that kids are treated differently at all because they live in an apartment or condo. There are a lot of families sacrificing to even afford that. The school and extracurricular activities are far more inclusive than any other school I have seen and people are friendly and welcoming. We could not be happier with the move and we actually don't miss the yard. We chose not to live on Mockingbird of Hillcrest because I worried too much about traffic. The other pro with going with a condo well within your budget is that it will always rent well and you can live there for cheaper than rent while you wait for opportunities to purchase a home or bigger place. Also, the kids all dress so casually that dress is not a marker of rich or poor. Everyone can afford Under Armour and neon soccer shorts.
I agree. There are so many more condos and SFA than there used to be...many families live in these now. I would not want to live on a busy street either...but just one bit of food for thought. There is a small fixer upper for sale directly across from bradfield. It would be SO easy for your child to walk to and from school alone...your own personal crossing guard practically at your door to cross the street. Huge playgrounds right there too for the weekend. As the kids get older they can also walk to movies, ice cream, Starbucks. Lots of families with young kids on either side too. I would generally choose condo over busy street but just wanted to point out the huge (IMHO) benefit of being right there. The house needs work though!
Thanks JTC Mom, I saw that house as well. It caught my eye because it is LITERALLY right across from Armstrong's play grounds. I can't find any interior pictures though, only exterior....which is a bit worrisome.
Thanks JTC Mom, I saw that house as well. It caught my eye because it is LITERALLY right across from Armstrong's play grounds. I can't find any interior pictures though, only exterior....which is a bit worrisome.
Thanks JTC Mom, I saw that house as well. It caught my eye because it is LITERALLY right across from Armstrong's play grounds. I can't find any interior pictures though, only exterior....which is a bit worrisome.
If that is the house I'm thinking of - it is being marketed as a tear-down - so it literally will need a lot of work. There is a single interior picture of it on Zillow... It has also seen a price reduction of over 6% which happened very quick and pretty rare for Park Cities RE.
Correction: might not be the one I'm thinking of, but there is another smaller home down Mockingbird that has lots of interior pictures available and recently had some renovations done. In any case... good luck on your search! And don't forget - Park Cities real estate can be a real gloves off knock down and drag'm out fight.
I know we've had a few threads similar to the topic, but wanted some parents opinions. We have two young boys that will be starting school within the next few years. We've looked into moving to other cities, states, etc when the time came for them to start, because our local school is pretty terrible. Our situation is a little different now in that graciously my parents have offered to help keep the boys as close as possible to them. This means no Plano, Coppell, Frisco, etc., and DEFINITELY no out of state. Our options now seem to be either a condo or small older house on a busy street in the Park Cities, or private school. I have concerns with both choices, but I'm leaning more and more towards the Park Cities for a few factors.
Private Schools Cons:
-Cost with little financial return on investment. $420,000-$780,00 for 2 boys in "premier" privates over 14 years. This is also taking into account that prices do not increase.
-House payments as well. We're going to also need a 200K+ house with mortgage payments as well on top of the tuition.
-Ability to get in. We all think/believe our kids our bright, but there is a real possibility that our boys will not get into the schools or our or their choosing.
-Friends living all over the metroplex. Yes a good majority of the kids live around Preston Hollow/Park Cities, but on multiple occassions my wife had to take the kids she nannies for to Plano and other cities to hang out with their friends(they all went to Jesuit).
HPISD Cons:
-Busy street
-Condo or one of the cheapest houses in HPISD. Let me make it clear that this doesn't bother ME or my wife, but we don't want out kids to be ridiculed for being the "poor" ones in the neighborhood. Kids are mean, we all know this, and with technology these days it's change so much more than even when I was in school.
-No backyard
Please share your thoughts and opinions and feel free to add to my cons lists, or add some pros to either, thank you!
Another thought:
One of the catholic schools for K-8 would offer these benefits, St. Rita, St. Monica etc. all cost almost exactly the same....
1. Vastly more diverse in all ways than HPISD
2. Live in North Dallas instead of PCs, much more bang for your housing buck - yard plus a SFH, less traffic, no tickets for driving 28 in a 25 etc.
3. Many fold greater chance both of your kiddos could attend the same school simultaneously when ages allow.
then JCP
1. JCP is much more diverse in all ways than GH, SM or even Cistercian.
2. Jesuit sports teams compete and compete well against the public schools.
3. Jesuit, even though they don't talk about it much, has sort of a dual track and similar benefits.
4. Jesuit had 9 NMSF kids this year as they are finally taking the PSAT seriously expect that number to maybe double over the next couple of years.
Costs:
St. Rita, St. Monica and the other catholic k-8 schools cost nearly the same as mentioned.
Current money:
12,400 yr. for two kids k-8 at parishioner's rates
18,400 yr. for two kids k-8 at non-parishioner's rates
31,300 yr. for two kids at Jesuit
If you could finagle parishioner's rates for k-8, K-12 would cost ~$239,050
If you couldn't finagle parishioner's rates k-8, k-12 would cost ~$290,800
You could establish a nice college war chest with the balance between those costs and say Saint Marks all the way or similar.
665k for ESD? I see they are continuing their streak as the most expensive co-ed school in Dallas. I'm sorry, but I am really unclear on what can possibly justify spending that much on a K-12 education?
I thought surely at that price they'd have a good # of students going to top 20 schools, but looking at the "ESD Profile 2012-2014" link kind of dispels that.
Looks like the schools with the largest # of matriculations for recent classes are A&M, UT Austin, Oklahoma, TCU & SMU. You can get into all those schools from Plano West, FloMo, Coppell or any other half-decent high school in the area.
If you have $ to burn, by all means, but considering the topic of your post, I don't see how you can go wrong with a free education in HP if you can afford a property you're satisfied with.
Only caveat to that would be if you are devoutly religious and want a religious worldview or if your children are cerebral enough to leverage St. Mark's to get them into an Ivy.
Social environments at many of the decent privates can be just as fast-paced & competitive as HP. Perhaps sometimes in different ways, but it's true.
This is just a realistic viewpoint speaking as someone who went to what people on here call a "2nd tier" private school & attended the same college as a lot of the kids going to these so-called 'elite' privates.
Sorry to ramble I took a pain killer for my back a couple of hours ago.........
The thing is one can't just look at colleges attended, excepting the military academies, one needs to know which programs these kids get into and also one needs to understand that a lot of kids from the top several private schools around here study STEM fields and many will attend graduate school or professional school. For these kids the luster of "Top-Twenty" colleges for undergraduate studies virtually disappears. Not to mention that a significant number of private school kids earn college scholarships. From a parents perspective I can tell you that when Baylor offers a 100% scholarship and Brown accepts your kiddo at full boat - Baylor looks awesome. Take engineering for example, excepting MIT, which is of course tiny, why would any kid who wants to be an engineer choose Harvard, Brown, Columbia, Cornell etc. over UT or A&M which are both better ranked overall and vastly less expensive for most? This is a bit stale but I'd guess the logic still applies when my son was looking at engineering programs in '09/'10 we made a matrix of Ivy (plus Stanford, Cal, Michigan, Harvey Mudd etc.) engineering degree rankings versus those at UT, TAMU, Rice and UH. Let's just say from any rational game theory perspective engineering in Texas crushed engineering across the Ivy league. Taking it to the extreme a kid could go to A&M's #1 ranked undergrad petroleum engineering program or UT's #2 ranked PE program and then go to UT's #1 ranked PE masters program and then go earn his/her Ph.D. at either schools top 1 or 2 programs. Why would a Texas kid study nuclear engineering at say Stanford, Yale or Princeton when the #1 program is at A&M? The same general logic applies across many of the biological sciences as well. If a kid wanted to study math then I'd give the Ivy League significant props.
So I went through this exercise last year when our family decided to relocate to the Park Cities for HPISD schools (from South Texas), however we had a very acrimonious real estate transaction for a home in Highland Park that went bad pretty quick - and boy did that set the tone. Because of timing for schools and the fact that we have a 2nd home in Montana, we ultimately decided to spend last school year in Montana. And frankly, in hindsight we felt like we dodged a bullet by not purchasing a home in the Park Cities. We ended up staying in San Antonio and building a home here and continuing on the private school route.
Here is why I mention this - everything in the Park Cities is ratcheted up a notch, and for a lot of families that can wear on you pretty quickly. So definitely take very serious consideration to the bubble environment that you would be moving in to. We've got tons of friends that live in the park cities that are great down to earth people, but that environment can really be insular at times.
RRBCFY -- Your experience sounds interesting and informative. Care to expand the details?
RRBCFY -- Your experience sounds interesting and informative. Care to expand the details?
Oh boy, where to begin?
The crazy real estate search in the park cities?
The crazy real estate transaction details in the park cities?
The crazy real estate agents?
Crazy sellers?
Hyper competitive PTA moms that would make any other texas suburban location PTA pale in comparison?
Or do you want to hear about
Who some of our potential neighbors would have been?
What the park cities looks like from 8am to 5pm weekdays?
Don't get me wrong - we LOVE the park cities, but it definitely isn't all rainbows and unicorns there. Even though our family is very well to do, at the end of the day my wife and I are afraid that it would have worn us down more than it should....
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