Choice Criteria: Diversity

One thing that is important to my wife and I is that our child be in a school that values diversity. To us, that means a balance of race, religion, and socioeconomic status. In general, this points towards public school, but not necessarily. If we send our son to our local public elementary school, Jenks, he may likely be the only Jewish child in his class, or only one of a small cohort.  Of course, if we send him to a private Jewish Day School, he may be the only REFORM Jewish kid in his class, so that may be even less desirable. The Friends School system values diversity on paper, but I need to learn more.  I would be surprised if there was a broad socioeconomic diversity at Friends.  One of the things we’ll be looking at when evaluating schools will be the race breakdown–that information is easy to find. Religious and socioeconomic breakdown will be harder to come by, so we will have to make inferences and assumptions based on the neighborhood and what we observe on school visits.

The information expressed in this post about the schools are assumptions only for illustrative purposes.  I still have to back it up with hard data and research.