In our state, you can apply for a geographic exemption (GE) if you want to attend a school that us out of the district you live in. They gave a rubric + lottery to see who is allowed in. Renting a place in the district is another way to getting into a school district. We did get into two different grade schools. First one was via GE.
We transferred them to a second school when we had intractable problems with the first. We used the address of a house we owned but were not living in (the house H grew up in). The school said that was fine as we paid all expenses including utilities property taxes for said house and it was vacant.
I have heard that some schools do somehow check to see if people live where they claim to for getting into popular public schools.
In my state, districts accept transfers to nearby districts if one can prove it benefits the child. For 4 years, we’ve been driving our daughter to and from the next nearest high school, which is 17 miles away. Some days would involve 3 car round trips. Although it was a pain on my driving days, it was totally worth it for a very smart child who needed a much better music program and honors/AP classes.
Yes, if there is a particular program the child is or would like to participate that is only in one if the schools, the child gets a bump up in the GE lottery here was well.
We have spent a LOT of money on our kid’s education, dance lessons since the age of 5, intensive summer dance programs, summer programs at “geek” camps, including three-week long residential programs since 7th grade. The time commitment was enormous - driving into town 3-4 times a week during the school year, and then spending a few hours waiting at the dance school was probably one of the largest. We have volunteered at the school, have never missed meeting with teachers, have spent a lot of time advocating for our kid. I have helped lead an advocacy organization for gifted education when I felt that not enough was being done, and we took our kid to shows, museums, and other cultural events.
However, we didn’t do it for the goal of making sure that our kid got into an “elite” college. To expand on what @doschicos wrote - a good education is important enough that we would have done it exactly the same, even if it had absolutely no effect on where our kid would go to college. As I’ve repeatedly written - we did not grow up here, and the idea of a kid’s entire K-12 fears being focused exclusively of activities that maximize the kid’s chances of being accepted to an “elite” college was, and is, a foreign concept for us. We sent our kid to dance schools and summer intensives because she loved to dance, was decently good at it, and it was healthy for her both physically and mentally, not because it was a good EC for her college application. In fact, until she was on HS, we had no idea that ECs on college applications were even a thing. We sent her to camps for gifted kids for many reasons, but those reasons did not include “it will help her get into an elite college”.
Almost all of the hundreds of hour, huge amounts of effort, and tens of thousands of dollars that we spent was invested in the person she would be when she left home at 18 and later, not in determining the college which she would attend. The most important thing we hoped for in a college was that her years there would help her continue on this path. We also hoped that our investment would make her choice of college less important in her life after college.
We took our kids on trips and to the theater and library and museums and everywhere else because those were things we and they enjoyed, not with any future goal in mind, like most of the others on CC.
We are happy it helped them have a wider and deeper appreciation due to their experiences but really weren’t concerned about something to add to any resume of application. We and they have no regrets.