Oswego vs Naperville Schools

[Chicago0304]

Currently they are Waubonsie, just finished Freshman year..We are petitioning to get them moved to Nequa since it's closer to their dad's and a better school. Overall Waubonsie is a rougher school than Nequa. Both Oswego high schools are near me, but they don't go there, so I don't know too much about them. I do like the subdivision I'm in, Churchill Club in Oswego.. Houses are half the price as Naperville and everything is close by. I would avaoid Waubonsie, even for resale purposes.

[bulldawg1594]

Originally Posted by Chicago0304

Currently they are Waubonsie, just finished Freshman year..We are petitioning to get them moved to Nequa since it's closer to their dad's and a better school. Overall Waubonsie is a rougher school than Nequa. Both Oswego high schools are near me, but they don't go there, so I don't know too much about them. I do like the subdivision I'm in, Churchill Club in Oswego.. Houses are half the price as Naperville and everything is close by. I would avaoid Waubonsie, even for resale purposes.

waubonsie is fine. i went to longwood elementary, which went into waubonsie until last year, now it goes to metea valley. i loved longwood though. its really diverse and stuff.

[bulldawg1594]

waubonsie valley has higher test scores than both the oswego high schools.

Interactive Illinois Report Card

Interactive Illinois Report Card

Interactive Illinois Report Card

[Joel67]

I live in Oswego in off Grove Road. We like this community quite a bit. It is has a changed a lot in the past 5 years and has a lot more retail / dining establishments than it did a few years ago. Most of these businesses are of the chain store variety. It is also about a 20m drive to Naperville if you are looking for boutique type stores/restaurants.

The schools here are good but not Naperville good. I do not so much attribute this to a shortcoming in the school system but rather a reflection of the population at large. Oswego is a middle class suburb with a good number of blue collar and agricultural families. Naperville is probably upper middle class and I would guess a lot of the families (maybe the majority) are college educated, white collar professionals.

What development in Oswego are you looking at? Would it feed OHS or OEHS?

[divakat]

I think Naperville is a better bet. I live near the downtown part, though, not the sprawl near NV. I walk everywhere, there are tons of trees, parks, shops and restaurants. I have two small children and everyone has been very sweet and friendly. I would try for Dist. 203. Less traffic, shorter commute to Chicago, not so many strip malls and more trees. Personally I would not live south of 75th and would try to stay east of 59. Too much sprawl, traffic and all the things I was trying to avoid about the suburbs when I moved from Chicago last year. Plus North Naperville has retained its value the most in the housing collapse.

[mudman]

Hi kirbsdc, what did you end up deciding? Both Oswego and Naperville are great options to have. As a parent with two boys at NV (one social, the other not) -- we all think it is great. I would expect the same great experience in Oswego.

[kurama93]

Is Waubonsie really that bad? Come on.....

[chet everett]

Originally Posted by kurama93

Is Waubonsie really that bad? Come on.....

I watch the President last night and in his State of the Union address he got some applause for talking about his"race to the top" thing as an improvement over No Child Left Behind. I think d204 is EXACTLY the kind of district that highlights the problems with EITHER approach, but also shows some promise to benefitnif parents, school officials and regular taxpayers actually pay attention to what is happening.

First you have to start the fact that well over half of all parentsnwith kids in public schools rate their schools as a an "A" on the A to F scale. This shows that most parents do not have a clue as to how poorly prepare their kids are for college and global competition. Their is no way we would be ninth in the world in terms of college grads is half of our schools were truly doing "A" work!

Second you can THANK NCLB for mandating tests that clearly show some schools are doing much better than others. Without NCLB you would have yucky mess of some kids taking tests that show how well / poorly they are being prepared and other schools coasting on their reputation. Sadly even with NCLB and the data from Illlinois Interactive Report Card there are still too many people that either through ignorance or stubborness or perhaps having some alternative agenda do not want to accept the fact that when significant numbers of kids leave high school unprepared for college or further success they will continue to be a burden on society and weaken communities. There are already some signs of this -- why do you think the health care law allows adults to ride on their parent's insurance plans through age 26???

Thirdly the idea that a "race to the top" type incentive program for SCHOOL DISTRICTS is truly a way to compete is hogwash. It is largely another silly Dept of Education effort to try and get 'consultant' types to fill out paperwork and win Federal grants for schools that largely are incapable of effecting student achievement without true accountability and radical shifts in who really takes responsibility for students that fail to work to their potential.

In do think there is a great opportunity for schools to really make efforts to differentiate themselves. Technology still has enormous potential to spur kids on to greater achievement. When I think about how hyper efficient some industries have become I wonder if any school district is willing to truly allow kids to separate themselves into much more heterogenous collections -- with technology it would be very easy to deliver more and more advanced tests and learning material to students earlier and earlier . Especially in a large Unit District the ability for kids to really dig into to advanced topics in mathematics, core language skills and certain kinds of science is huge - imagine if 204 allowed the top students at all campuses to share in on "tele-learning" so that the most advanced kids were taught by the best teachers regardless of which campus they were nearest to, you could have kids basically finishing junior college by the time they graduate high school! That would free up the teachers on each physical campus to give more individual attention to the poorer performing kids in smaller classrooms so that they would benefit from closer supervision that the more self motivated students tend not to need. It also would allow the schools to have more logically oriented salary tracks -- the folks that claim they teach PE or coach a sport becuase they love it so much could be given salaries more inline with the modest incomes enjoyed by most personal trainers and such while the teachers with more lucrative technical skills could be justified in receiving salaries closer to that of college professors at large universities where the lecture hall and distance learning models help to spread costs out over larger number of enrollees.

Of course this could not happen unless the monolithic teacher contracts promoted by union leadership that is largely from the ranks of PE and coaching does not get out of the way.

Just to reinforce the thinking -- look at what folks mostly rave about at the newer 204 schools - gyms, pools, athletic fields. Granted their is some value in having kids be healthy and compete in sports, but when these considerations outweigh the value of offering AP classes or even modern computer programming and foreign language that are pretty standard in other parts of the world that shows how out of whack our values have gotten. Beyond this, it is peculiar that while our technological manufacturing and bio/pharm companies are generally doing very well the only sorts of "vocational" offerings high schools have are more along the lines of stuff that kids from several genrerations ago may have been pushed toward and even that is often handled by "community college" instead of the high school. Really shameful considering how much these schools cost and how little the broader community getsmfor their investment...