Choosing Roslindale: Our Move to Boston

We bought a house in Rozzie, and we finally move this Friday. It was not an easy choice to leave the town of Westwood where I’ve been active in several town boards, developed many friendships, and started our oldest daughter in the school system. (And authored the Westwood Blog for the past 3 years.) It was not easy to move past the neighboring town of Dedham either, where we also have many friends and probably would have purchased a house had it not gone under agreement the day we scheduled to go look at it. But I am excited about where we are moving and am thrilled we decided to do it.

It shouldn’t be a surprise we’d be attracted to really living in Boston (Roslindale is a neighborhood of Boston) for anyone who has followed the urbanism thread of this blog. I was excited about the Westwood Station project because it promised to bring some urban advantages to our community. I created a town board to promote active transportation–walking and cycling–because I believed we could really enhance the community by connecting our village centers and making it easier for more people to get out on the street. I commuted to work in Boston on my bike (14 miles or so) and via the train not only because I didn’t want to sit in traffic or park my car, but because it made me feel more like I was a part of the city that has called me to come home ever since I was a college student at MIT in the 1980s.

But what about the schools? It was our biggest concern. I found a blog, started by a Roslindale parent, called Braving the Lottery, which details her journey through enrolling her kids in the Boston Public Schools. My daughter is eligible to attend any one of more than a dozen elementary schools but transferring mid-year, there will not really be any choice or lottery. We submitted a list of our preferences and we’ll see what we get–hopefully later today or tomorrow.

I’m optimistic we will be happy as long as we get one of the schools we know have openings. Because class size is limited by law, the popular choices are full and have wait lists from the last lottery process earlier this year. But families do move (the people who sold us their house moved to Dedham) and parents don’t necessarily yank their kids from one school to another this late in the year, so it’s not necessarily an automatic as to where we will be assigned. Once we get in to a school, we hope that our sibling priority will be able to pull along the other kids who are currently in preschool.

Over on Westwood Blog, I recently noted how Westwood was featured by Great Schools.org as one of the top 5 school systems in the country. When you look up my daughter’s current school, it’s a ‘10′ on a 1-10 scale–based largely on the fact that everyone passes the standardized tests. And we know from our own experience that it’s a great community school for many reasons other than just the test scores: parents are active, involved, and engaged and teachers and the principal are great.

Where we are moving…no 10s. But those numbers are all about the pass rates for standardized tests. We talked to parents and attended meetings to learn about our potential schools and heard mostly positive stories–and a great deal of energy from parents, teachers, and administrators who are working hard to improve their schools. The lottery does cause the schools to compete and attempt to differentiate themselves. In the end, we concluded 1) we will need to be heavily involved in our kids education and 2) it’s more about the specific teacher and classroom year-to-year.

I see some advantage to engaging in system that is trying to improve. When everything is already great, sometimes we miss the opportunity to see how our efforts contribute to positive change. Learning is more than just passing tests–I think it’s also about an experience of growing and adapting. I think we have set ourselves up for many of those opportunities in the coming years.