PTO Today

We are looking to relocate either to the West Virginia area or to suburbs of Phoenix, AZ. I don't have a location for West Virginia as it is company recruiting my husband and we do not know which store they would put him in. We currently live in small town Iowa and would like some direction on how the school systems are in these places. I wish I had more information about region but will at some point soon. Otherwise, we are interested in relocating to the Phoenix area and would like to know more about the suburbs and general regions/schools that are most promising.

use the internet. go to the state website. ie in a search engine, enter 'VA school scores' or similar. what you want to find is the state site with all the AYP (average yearly progress) and API scores for the schools. they also list demographic info, school and class sizes, etc. and more info than you could possibly want, for EACH school in the state.

dont rely on other sites that might have similar infos, they are not as reliable. find the STATE (govt) site that reports on all school districts. its a good place to start.

This site is great: www.schoolmatters.com. You do need the name of the city or School district but you can easily do a direct compare with any school across the country. I thought it was interesting to compare my own kids school district with the one we moved from.