Colorado Springs Vintage Homes Blog

Relocating, it’s all about the schools

Are you relocating to the Colorado Springs area, or perhaps the Air Force Academy or Fort Carson or Peterson Field ?  Are you relocating with USAA?  Trying to decide where to live ?    

For a Free Colorado Springs Relocation Guide, Email Kathy Torline at KTorline@msn.com

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To find out how Colorado Springs area schools rank, national and local web sites offer an assortment of school and neighborhood data.    The national sites typically pull school and demographic data to generate their school profiles, consequently information on private schools is harder to come by.

But before we start with national sites, let’s first start with links to the school districts in the area:

• District 2   (Harrison)
• District 3  (Widefield)
• District 8 (Fountain)
• District 11 
• District 12  (Cheyenne)
• District 14  (Manitou Springs)
• District 20  (Academy)
• District 23  (Peyton)
• District 38  (Lewis Palmer) 
• District 49  (Falcon)

OK, now it’s time for the national web sites……………..

School Digger

• Wealth of information for families with school-age children (test scores, ethnic information, student/teacher ratios and other metrics).
• Schools are ranked by a number of criteria, which enables parents to compare and contrast the nearby schools, locally as well as on a state level.
• Has the ability to search for the schools within a certain distance of a particular address.

NeighborhoodScout

• Search for the areas with the best schools according to a ranking system that the site touts as more accurate than simply comparing test results.
• Includes a tool to find neighborhoods that are best tailored to families with school-age children.

Great Schools

• Another popular site that can help compare schools as well as to find schools in specific communities
• Both private and public schools are listed at all grade levels.
• Provides basic information on grade levels, as well as details on spending per student, teacher experience and types of extracurricular programs offered.
• Grades schools on a star system derived, in part, by comparing schools’ scores on state standardized tests.

National Center for Education Statistics

• Click on the “School, College, & Library Search” tab at the top in order to view data including a particular school’s student-to-teacher ratio or enrollment by race and ethnicity.
• A national database of school demographic information

School Matters

• A useful site for researching schools and comparing them.
• Can search for a specific school or look up nearby schools by ZIP code, district or city.
• You can also read reviews by parents about the schools, and if you wish, write a review about your child’s school.
• The site allows users to generate side-by-side comparisons of up to three schools at once.  
• One drawback, it doesn’t include private schools on its site.

Education.com

• Includes stories on everything from child development to bullying, and also features a detailed catalog of public and private schools across the U.S. 
• Like the other sites, parents can find a trove of testing data, teacher information and a demographic overview of the school’s student population.
• Includes other details , such as the percentage of students who were absent more than 21 days, classified as gifted, or speak limited English.

School Data Direct

• Can view performance, spending and demographic information for any state,
• Check out links to state education departments, investigate individual schools and more.

Also, as I was putting together this article I came across some interesting information in the Southern Economic Forum publication which listed the graduation info for each school district in the Colorado Springs area.  Colorado has a graduation rate of 75%.  District 11, Harrison and Edison are all under 70%.   Graduation rates for other school districts are.

• Widefield (district 3) 81.5%
• Falcon (district 49) 83.2%
• Fountain (district 84%
• Academy (district 20) 91.4%
• Cheyenne (district 12) 93.4%
• Manitou Springs (district 14) 94.9%
• Lewis-Palmer (district 38) 94.9%

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To find out more information about Colorado Springs, Call ……

Kathy (719-287-1049)   KTorline@msn.com

Tags: Colorado Springs School Districts, Colorado Springs schools, fountain colorado schools, manitou springs schools, moving to Colorado Springs, moving to Ft. Carson, relocating to Colorado Springs, USAA moving to Colorado Springs

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 3rd, 2009 at 3:22 am and is filed under For Buyers, Relocation Information. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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