Laguna Beach or Newport Beach with children?

[NOLA101]

Originally Posted by mbell75

What is your budget? Laguna is quite a bit more expensive then Newport.

Prime Newport (CDM) is much more expensive than prime Laguna.

And Laguna schools are weaker than Newport Harbor schools.

There are no heavily public Jewish schools anywhere in OC, BTW. OC is mostly nonwhite, and the whites are mostly Protestant. Southern CA has a large Jewish population but mostly in LA County. If you want a neighborhoods and schools with a Jewish feel, LA County is your only option in Southern CA.

[glowinthedark]

Originally Posted by NOLA101

One warning- I moved from NY too, and my kid was in Newport schools.

Coming from NYC area, you will be disappointed with schools. Even the best public schools in OC don't match up with top NYC area public schools.

If you're used to schools like Stuyvesant, Bronx Science or suburban Scarsdale, Great Neck, Greenwich, etc. you will be sorely disappointed with schools like CDM High. The standards in OC are so much lower and only the Asians in OC are really valuing high expections like you see in the NY area.

And with the privates, the difference is even bigger. There are no Ivy League factories out here. There's no school in OC where the average kid has a reasonable chance at a top tier school.

The above poster is probably correct.
I too moved from NYC and have personal experience of one of the great public high schools of NYC and the Ivy League. The only true "feeder school" is probably Harvard-Westlake in LA. For OC, none of the privates are more successful than a top public school in the college admissions race, and admissions from the publics is fairly scattered geographically. Irvine schools are no more successful than a handful of other good publics, despite all the marketing efforts of the Irvine Company, e.g. Newport, CDM, Laguna, Troy, Oxford, Palos Verdes. South Orange County has even fewer powerhouse schools, with admissions being very scattershot and varying greatly from year to year.

I do alumni interviews for one of the Ivy's and I can confirm this looking at the data for my particular alma mater going back about 10 years.

Of course, one could argue this is not the best measure of a high school's success. And I would venture a guess that fewer smart kids in Southern California are even looking to go all the way to the Northeast for college when they have Stanford, Caltech, and the UCs so close by. (I think its a particularly Eastern Seaboard kind of mindset that all top students aspire to the Ivys).