Local Public School?

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I don't know what I'm doing. Our Daughter is 3 1/2 and we've started looking into schools to figure out what school she should go to when she hits 5. I want to check out our local public school and see if it's right for our daughter, or if we need to send her to a Private or Montesori school. I've looked it up in Great Schools and there's 20 public schools in a 5 mile radius of our house. How do I figure out which one our daughter would be sent to? Or could I apply to any of those schools?

As I said I don't know what I'm doing and would like any advice.

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We had the same dilema. However the choice is made a easy by the location of your residence. Every school accepts students from a certain area. So even if you have 20 schools all of them will not accept your application. U need to call up the school and find out if you fall in their perimeter. If u do then u can apply. If you fancy another school that and they are not accepting applications from another area u can apply to the school u belong and then ask for a transfer. No guarantees. the transfer depends on the principals of both the school and the availability of space. This is what i was told when I was looking for my son.
Private schools are totally different. they work on a different scale.Hope this helps.

I can understand your concerns. I'm currently trying to find a school for my child who just turned five. I don't want to send him to the neighborhood school and therefore i was looking at other options like charter schools or other public schools that have open enrollment. Normally your child if going to public school has to attend the school in the area. You can contact your board of education and see which one of the twenty schools in your area is the attending school. Also try going to the board of education website. This is a great place to find the school report card, test scores, attendance, student teacher ratio, and more. You may want to consider schools with open enrollment. Also if sending your child to a charter or open enrollment school you will want to fill the applications out when she turns four, so that she can already have been accepted into the school by the time she is five.

Also find out if your area offers school choice through open enrollment or child care permits. Sometimes, you can choose a school that's not the one you're districted for by filling out an application and getting in that way.

The easiest way to find out if a particular school offers it is to call the school directly.

Thank you, I don't think I would have figured that out by myself.

I'm looking for a Kindergarten, she's already in preschool. If I found a school that had a preschool where she would move from preschool to Kindergarten, I'd be open to that.

Check out the district website, they should have maps that show which areas of the community go to which school. This way you can know which are closest and choose the best one to fit your daughter from there.

Are you checking into a preschool program or just Kindergarten?

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