Each family has different priority criteria in their home search. My husband and I are at the point when school district is our first priority for our next house purchase. I’ve been digging through several websites and statistics in order to decide the decent school district as well as best location for our next house. It is a lot of work and I know that we are not alone. For the purpose of saving you time in doing the same thing, I have 5 tables with schools from different districts and cities rankings. The rankings were done by a company called “schooldigger.com”. The methods and data that they used seem reliable to me. However, their website contents a serious data that goes on for days. So I condensed the information I found most helpful to many of us and put them in simpler tables. Certainly, if for some reason you need to look into an in-depth data and analysis, check out their website. I think they did an awesome job!
Table 1: Washington School District Rankings
I love this table for clarification of what cities belong to what school district. This addresses the most asked questions for home buyers who care about school district that their future home locates in. Besides giving you the accurate rating for each school district, it provides you with how many elementary/ middle/ high school in that school district.
Table 2: Washington City Rankings
If you are aiming for a house, you need to know the big picture of school system’s ranking in that city. The table below is a snapshot way to see how schools compare in Washington. It shows the number of elementary, middle, and high schools in your target city, as well the number of private schools. This piece of information sometimes is very important because if your absolutely dream house happens to not be in the high-ranking school city, your next option is probably sending the kids to private school.
I have two little toddlers, so elementary school ranking is my most searched topic when it comes to houses and that’s why you see a lengthy table when compared to all other tables presented. In table 3, 4 and 5, you will see similar categories of the city and school districts each school belongs in. They list the average standard score in 2017, number of students, and student-teacher ratio. I can’t tell you enough how much I appreciate the data schooldigger.com pulling date from the counties and putting them together. From these three charts, Bellevue School District and Lake WA School District consistently ranking well in all school grades. That explains why homebuyers who are parents gravitate towards Bellevue, Sammamish and Issaquah making them the hottest markets. However, looking at these charts we can see that there are other cities that are less popular with great schools.
House shopping in this market is not easy. With competition for homes at an all time high, the added challenge of making sure the house you desire falls in a good school system obviously makes house buying a stressful venture. I hope this post gives you the big picture of school system locally, where to start your house search, or at least where you want to be next when planning for your future family.
Source:
https://www.schooldigger.com/go/WA/districtrank.aspx
School Districts in King country
http://www5.kingcounty.gov/sdc/Metadata.aspx?Layer=schdst&XMLAvail=True
Ivy Truong Broker 