A question for my readers

Blogging is a little slow around here right now because my computer has acquired the habit of spontaneously rebooting itself. Sometimes it will go for hours with nary a wayward reset, and sometimes it won't go five minutes. Unfortunately, my efforts to narrow down the cause of the reboots have led me to believe that I am dealing with a hardware problem. But never fear! Replacement parts are on the way. Indeed, I am assured that they will be here no later than Monday. (Incidentally, the estimated day of arrival is itself somewhat vexing. I paid for second day delivery, yet the parts were shipped via UPS Ground. It is trying my patience, especially with geeky dreams of new hardware dancing in my head.) If I'm a little light on content for the next few days, well, at least I have an excuse this time. But rest assured I will make every effort to continue my recently-reacquired habit of posting in a more timely manner.

But now I'm going to change the subject. I have a question for you.

My son will be starting kindergarden in a little over six months. Caren and I are getting excited about it, but we also find ourselves facing a choice that neither of us are especially prepared to make. In the small town where we grew up, there was only one school. When it was time to go, everyone in town went to the same school. As you can probably imagine, the situation here in Omaha is quite a bit different. There are lots of schools, both public and private, for our kids to potentially attend. Omaha divides the public school district such that where you live determines where your kids will attend elementary school*. Since we have already ruled out private schools, the choice would be made for us...

...except that we're planning on moving to a different part of town this summer for a variety of reasons, one of which is the opportunity to choose which school our kids will attend. So we get to choose, which is good. But neither Caren nor myself have ever had any experience with choosing an elementary school. And that's where you come in.

We know that diversity is very important to us, and we know that we will be able to determine a school's diversity fairly easily. But beyond that, we are having a hard time figuring out exactly how we should go about this. I know we can schedule walk-throughs, but what should we look for? Are there standard questions we should ask? Also, I'm a little nervous about the whole thing because I've noticed that the schools with the best diversity are also the ones that people tell us are bad schools that should be avoided. But what exactly is a "bad school"? I'm not sure how much I trust such a general assessment. Caren teaches music at one of the so-called "bad" high schools, and she's never had any problems with her students. I have more than a little bit of suspicion that "bad" schools get that designation more from unconscious racism than any kind of academic consideration. Just how should one go about determining whether a particular school is "bad"?

I'm sure a lot of this will be obvious when I read your answers. But I feel like I've already let time get away from me -- when the heck did my kids get so old, anyway? And believe it or not, it didn't occur to Caren and me that we didn't know how to do this until we started actually trying to do it. So I'm hoping that some of you have dealt with this before.

So that's my question: How did you do it? Leave your answers in the comments, and thanks in advance!


* Actually, Omaha has cooperative zones. We can choose to send our kids to the school in the zone where we live, or we can send them across town to one other zone that partners with ours. I wouldn't even mention it except that I know there are a handful of people in Omaha who read this blog. The greater point is still true: If we are willing to move, we can choose which school our kids will attend.