Having lived abroad for 13 years (and the entirety of my kids’ education) I really am at a loss for planning a possible return to the US.
My son is 13 and will be starting 8th grade in our current country this August.
A possible return to the US could happen in December or in the summer after 8th grade.
If we want to put him in our local public school - what is the process? Do I just walk in any day and register him? Do they have to accept him? Even in the middle of the year? What records will they need?
And, any advice on whether to move during 8th grade (to allow him to get his feet under him before HS) or to just wait until he is starting 9th grade?
Do you know where you will be living? If so, google the school district, all policies regarding enrollment should be clearly spelled out there. It’s hard to answer your specific questions since all districts in all states are different. Where I live, some schools will absolutely take a student mid-year, others will still accept him/her, but the district will assign your child a particular school based on enrollment numbers/space availability. Usually you will need proof of address, a transcript and – this is important – an immunization record. Again, most of the information should be online.
As to whether you should wait til 9th grade… that’s a personal decision, and one you could base on how the schools are organized in the given area. Where I live, there are several choices of high school, and many 8th graders don’t move to 9th grade along with all their classmates from middle school. In effect many start “new” in high school, so socially moving him in mid-year may make less sense than waiting till 9th grade. OTOH, moving in 8th grade would help your child get accustomed to American-style of teaching/interacting with teachers, etc. So there are advantages of doing either.
^ ^ ^
Call first then, some of these may be needed.
-Transcript- with school description of classes if available.
-Immunization record
-Birth Certificate
-Copy of a utility bill to confirm you live in the district.
-Checkbook to pay for PE uniform, lock for lockers, AS fees, whatever.
(You may be asked for most recent annual exam to confirm vision and hearing)
Call to confirm first!
The majority of public HSs yeah you just apply. Some though, usually the cream of he crop public High Schools, require an entrance exam. For example Lowell HS in San Francisco or Stuyvesant HS in New York, or Whintney Young, Northside Prep, Payton, Jones in Chicago. Usually done sometime in 8th grade before December. So it depends which city you are moving back to.
A public school must provide an education once you prove you live in the district. Where they put you is often up to them. They don’t have to put him into a charter, or magnet, or specialty school. They don’t even have to put him in 8th grade.
We moved the summer before my kids started 9th grade. We’d missed the opportunity to apply to any special programs (school of the arts or STEM) but they would have been accepted into the high school zoned for our rented apt. They went to a catholic high school, but then transferred to the public school the next year. Then we moved again! This time mid year, and this time the Catholic school wouldn’t take them mid year, but suggested we go to a public school and then transfer AGAIN! No thank you. We moved to a public district we liked, again having been shut out of any special schools like the school of the arts. We were also delayed a few days before starting because their vaccination records had to be transferred to an official state form by the Dept of Health. This was a problem because my daughter moved in the middle of her sports season and she couldn’t play until she’d been in school for 5 full days. They also lost almost a month of school during the transfer as the school we left had just finished the first semester while the school we moved to was almost done with the 3rd quarter.
There are pros and cons to moving in 8th grade, like finding out about the high schools in the area and applying, meeting friends and joining activities before the summer. Cons are that it is such a short time to adjust. I’d probably wait and just start high school.
As others have said the process varies from district to district. In large urban districts you may end up at a less than desirable school because you missed out on selective enrollment school applications. In someplace like Chicago that would be the case. Of course you could move instead to one of the suburbs near Chicago and the top notch school who you are distracted for, like New Trier, will be required to take you.
My feeling is that an earlier move is better. If you move just prior to high school, the classes your D belongs in could be full. While the school does have to enroll your kid, they don’t have to place them into the level you think is appropriate. If you come during 8th grade, she will be enrolled in high school classes at the same time as everyone else and won’t just be looking for open slots.
As others have stated, the district really makes a difference. If larger cities there are multiple high schools to choose from. In less populated areas, there is just one high school for the whole town so that is where you go. There is no one answer to this.
I would move in the beginning of summer. Starting the last middle school class mid-year may be very hard socially, if not necessarily academically. In summer he can go to summer camps to meet some of his future classmates, and generally get adjusted to life in the US.
Outside of cities, where you live generally dictates the school (which will be supported to some extent, often almost exclusively, by property taxes.) The funding sourves varies by state. Depending on where you are moving to, you should research districts and house-hunt accordingly.
In areas like mine, where several middle schools consolidate into a regional high school, it’d be easier to just start 9th when everyone is coming into the school together. But in other districts as mentioned above, to get tracked properly, you might be better off coming in in 8th. In places like NYC, 8th graders take the tests for magnet schools, so I would think it’d be challenging to break into that system outside the dates. (Otoh, there are fabulous puBlic schools in the expensive commuter suburbs of nyc.)
So I think really the answer to your question depends on which part of the country you are headed to and how flexible you are in terms of city, suburb, etc. Btw, many realtors can give you an overview of this, so if you are coming back for a visit, scheduling some time to see what’s available for housing in several districts, even if you aren’t ready to buy, can be pretty informative. Again, where we live, you can generally get much more house with much lower taxes in a less great district. (And there are people who choose that option and private school over less house and good public, realizing they need the school for 4 years and the house for longer.)
And fwiw, as a kid who moved a lot, if you move in summer, my advice is to move toward the end. Very lonely and sad to have a whole summer in a place where you don’t know anyone…
Google “Great Schools,” adding the name of the state or city if you know where you want to be and you’ll get a website which ranks and describes schools. It’s a good place to start.
In my suburban district there are 6 comprehensive high schools plus a magnet hs and a school for kids with various issues. Eighth grade families submit paperwork by the end of January if they want to apply to the magnet school or for an inter-district transfer (we have neighborhood preference and the option to transfer to the other comprehensive schools if there is space). The lottery for the magnet school is done around the end of February and all of the offers for transfers go out about the first or 2nd week of March. There is usually a waitlist for the magnet school and for one or two of the comprehensive schools and the district works their way down that waitlist over time as kids move away or decide to go to private school instead.
The point of that all is… if you move into the area after about the end of January, you’ll get a spot at a comprehensive school in the district but you won’t have priority for application to the magnet school, and if you come after about March (? I don’t know exactly), you might not get a spot in your closest neighborhood school, if it’s one of the more popular ones to transfer into. The good news in our district is that all of the schools are good and just have different strengths so you wouldn’t get stuck at a terrible school. But transportation might be more of an issue.
“My feeling is that an earlier move is better. If you move just prior to high school, the classes your D belongs in could be full. While the school does have to enroll your kid, they don’t have to place them into the level you think is appropriate. If you come during 8th grade, she will be enrolled in high school classes at the same time as everyone else and won’t just be looking for open slots”
And this may be why it is important to consider the rules of the school district where you are considering moving if you have some choice. In ours there is no such thing as a “ full class”” Students are recommended for a level but can always override the recommendation and be placed in whatever level they want.
Some schools have a tendency to assume that “kid educated abroad = poor education”. Beware of this and have all documentation that might be needed for proper placement. For instance, if in his school system algebra1 is a 7th grade class and geometry is an 8th grade class, you need to have that recorded somewhere and provide curriculum details, perhaps with a copy of the end of the year final, or your son may end back in algebra1 for 9th grade.
In our district you apply for choice schools and magnets in January or February of the year before you age up - 5tth for middle school and 8th for HS programs. I would start in 8th. My niece moving from abroad wasn’t put in any honors classes because way her international school didn’t label them that way. If you are there half of 8th you have time to figure out the system and have child included in testing for higher level hS placement if appropriate. So 8th might give your child time to get in sync with programs.
All good advice. I add that you’ll need to decide just how competitive a high school. Some are nuts, while some won’t offer the challenges you feel are right for him. Or ECs and guidance. It’s not just about ranking. Look at course variety, things like how many go off to 4 year colleges. Also if kids are tracked (whether course progression, usually math, is set based on his level in 8th or 9th vs choices based on his abilities and interests.) Someone else can explain that better than I can.
You want, if possible, the school that empowers him, in the ways that matter to your family.
Everything will depend on where it is that you move to.
My sisters live in a state with many small districts and essentially open enrollment between school districts - if you are willing to do the driving, you can enroll your kid wherever you want to. The state money follows the kid. My BFF lives in a state with many small districts but no provision for cross-district enrollment other than pleading your case with the superintendent and paying out-of-district tuition and fees. The state money doesn’t follow the kid. In my state, school districts are county-wide and arranging enrollment at anything but your neighborhood school requires luck for the magnets, savvy for the special ed or tech ed programs, and insider contacts for any other kind of alternate enrollment (e.g. closer to parents workplace). I used to live in a state with geographically huge, but sparsely populated school districts where the advent of online class options meant that students could actually have electives, and not just take exactly the same classes as everyone else every year.
So while you are thinking about the general (now? later? later than that?), do give some thought to the particular (here or there? if there, then this side of the state/county/school district line, or that side?) as well. As soon as you do have a notion of where it is you are going to land, let us know. We will do our best to help you find a local expert.
I would start in 8th grade. Even though it’s hard socially, one advantage of arriving mid-year is that teachers generally will make an extra effort to help you get to know people and how the system works. If you start in 9th everyone will assume you are starting with the same experiences as everyone else.
I moved from overseas the summer before two oldest entered 9th and 7th grades. They had been enrolled in a foreign public school and were not in an international or IB school. Their transcripts were in a foreign language and I translated them. Based on my experience, if your child is not at an American or International School, I would recommend moving at mid-year.
In my area, you go to the school board office to register new students. The schools themselves are closed over the summer. Which meant we couldn’t pick out classes and finalize registration until the guidance counselors were back in their offices, about two weeks before school started. By the time we got an appointment, tryouts for fall sports and some other activities had already happened and some classes were full. (We did find out about auditions for the spring musical at the high school the day before those happened. Which was also before school started.)
I had made sure both kiddos English skills were grade level, and had assumed all would be fine with math. It wasn’t. They were unfamiliar with American units (but were aces at the metric system!) and used commas and decimal points differently. I was successfully able to argue my son into a higher math class than his test scored indicated, though. (The country we’d come from did national math tests and my son was nationally ranked in the top 100 or so in math, so I knew he was capable.) I gave up on placements in other classes and figured we’d get it sorted out by high school. We did.
Things at the high school didn’t go as well. Based on her foreign transcript, they wanted to put her in ESL. I wanted her in Honors English and testing got her there. She tested out of Algebra, but since she didn’t have a credit for it, the head of the math department was saying she needed to take it. What finally got her in the right math class was that she scored really high on the pre-test and told the teacher she already knew everything that was going to be taught. That teacher got her into the right level class about a week after school started. One of the biggest issues that we hadn’t anticipated was the volume of summer work the school gives to graduating 8th graders. She now had just over a week to complete it and it was a crazy amount. We were anticipating receiving our shipment of household goods any day and were going to have to unpack to boot. The English department head gave her a slight extension. The history department head said no way. She needed to turn in her gazillion pages of notes taken in the Cornell notes style (we’d never heard of this) and be ready to take a test on the first day. Contacted the guidance counselor again and she said we’d have to drop to a lower class. That actually almost was a disaster. Kiddo was bored out of her mind and the teacher called me in for a conference because she actually started acting up in class as a result. In that class, they were given “guided” (ie fill in the blank) notes, countless reviews for tests, etc. We worked up a plan (akin to an IEP, but completely unofficial) of “accommodations” like letting kiddo take her own notes in class. The teacher thought it was ridiculous that she was in the class, but there was no moving her up until the year was over. In the end, all worked out; she graduated and went to a college she is very happy at.