How to Choose the Best School for Your Child

I’ve been an educator my whole life and taught in both public and private school classrooms—including two middle schools in Plano ISD. I’ve worked with gifted students and kiddos with learning differences, and, after all of my experience both as a teacher and as a parent, I can honestly tell you the following: there simply is no way to designate a school universally “great” for everyone.

Every child has a unique set of talents, needs, and challenges, and every family has its own sense of how their child should be shaped and prepared through education. The challenge, then, is to ask the right questions when researching the best schools for your child.

By conventional measurements, the public school districts north of Dallas are highly successful. A quick glance on most school rating siteswill show you that the overwhelming majority of schools in cities like Plano (https://www.pisd.edu), Frisco (http://www.friscoisd.org), and Prosper (https://www.prosper-isd.net) all score well above the national average on standardized tests. The success of these school districts plays a large part in drawing people to these townships, knowing that their children will receive a highly competitive, free public education. And folks are not wrong to move for this reason. These cities do have excellent public schools, as well as academically-enriched summer camps and fantastic library programs (http://planodcs.org) for youth and teens.

The harder question is this: which individual school is best for your child? Even in highly acclaimed school districts like those found in the cities north of Dallas, there are substantial differences from school to school. When looking to get more granular in your search for the best school for you and your child, you first will need to answer some questions yourself. Below is a sample list of questions to help guide you in your research:

How do you define a successful education for your child?

Does academic achievement far outweigh all other definitions of success?

Do you strongly value a school culture that teaches and fosters social and emotional intelligence?

Is admission and/or scholarships to top colleges the ultimate goal for school?

Does your child have specific needs that can be addressed at school?

Is it important to have your child in smaller classes or grades where s/he is more likely to be truly known by teachers and administrators?

Is it important for your child to have a skillful and caring school counselor?

Will your child qualify for special education or gifted and talented programs?

Would you like your child to have access to work-study programs in the middle or high school years that teach through real-world application?

Are their themed charter schools or specialty programs (e.g. International Baccalaureate) that you think your child could benefit from joining?

Schools within each district—and the parents of the children who attend those schools—have distinct values, and their answers to the questions above can vary quite significantly. Once you know what you value for your child, you know what questions to ask when searching for the right school. The next step is knowing where to look for answers.

You can glean a lot of information from school websites and from the bios written by school administrators. You can also ask the school receptionist to put you in touch with the PTA representative for your child’s grade—connecting with parents is probably the best way to get honest and detailed answers to your questions about any given school.

As for our family, we were looking for a smaller school that had 1) a faculty with experience; 3) administrators that were well-respected by parents; 4) a school culture where discipline was firm but fair; and 5) a community of parents that were helpful and supportive of each other, with a healthy interest in their children’s social and academic growth.

We chose our home in Plano in large part because of the neighborhood elementary school—it has been all that we had hoped and more!