Harwood Heights & Norridge Schools (Chicago, Park Ridge: how much, school districts, offices)

[elanmorin25]

Does anyone know anything about these towns in terms of the school quality? The attendance boundaries seem confusing with little islands sending kids to certain school districts but all the surrounding areas sending kids to others. Do kids have the option of attending different schools? Any local info would be appreciated.

[chet everett]

Norridge and Harwood Heights are weird little towns carved out by folks that did not want to get annexed into Chicago or Rosemont so the funky boundaries of the various schools districts should come as no surprise.
The schools are not all that desirable. I seem to recall that they may have once been hotbeds of folks opposed to the sorts of busing and such that was once proposed as a way to bring equality to CPS but frankly given the performance and distance from the NW side to the top tier magnet schools in CPS (both geographically and in terms of results) maybe that was not such a good idea...

Norridge D80 has two PK-8 schools with middle of the road performance, Union Ridge is a rare one building district that does a little worse and Pennoyer is worse still. They all feed into Ridgewood High that does worse still. Frankly this is one of those situations that screams for consolidation -- it would be far more efficient to roll these four districts with unimageable duplication of services into one unit district that would be far less costly to run. I suspect there are folks making out like absolutely bandits in the various district offices that have deep ties to the corrupt legislators that protect these kind of goldbrickers...

It is sorta sad that all these schools have kind of similar demographics but I suspect there are fiercely held beliefs at each school about how much better / worse each is, the money they'd not spend duplicating a full complement of administrative staff could be used to get better results in the classrooms.

I think even Rosemont schools (which feed into Leyden) are better, but in terms of "insular" Rosemont is legendary....

[elanmorin25]

Looking at the attendance zones, it appears that parts of both towns feed into Maine South high school. Any idea what's up with that?

[chet everett]

There are few block that are in the Maine South attendance area. Not sure how much a factor that is increasingly desirability, most folks probably would prefer to have neighbors in Park Ridge ...