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Comment by msie | Hacker News Reader

$88000/year for kids' schooling?!?! Couldn't enroll them in public school?

Calling himself "lower middle class" is a joke. How many middle class send their kids to a private school?

A decent number. But most middle class folks (or those outside upper middle class at least) don't send multiple kids to $44,000/student/year schools, let alone one kid.

In some cities sending children to private school is a very middle class thing to do. It depends on the local public school system.

In places where housing was affordable, especially ten years ago, no... you wouldn't necessarily have wanted to enroll your kids in the public school where you lived.

I was in SF when my child was young, but as soon as we started digging into the school enrollment processes, I moved to Lafayette and enrolled him there.

Lafayette was more expensive than Union City, but a better place to live and school, but perhaps not a place where a house could be as affordable.

That said, none of it would compare with a 32 acre farm near Vancouver, IMHO...

Some people consider their children their first priority. Why the US education system is failing above average children is a different argument. I send both my kids to private school and consider it a necessity.

You don't know what school your kid is going to end up in, because of the lottery system. You might have your kindergartner going to school across the city.

This is foreign to me, can you explain it a bit more? Where I live, we have school districts, and inside those districts are boundaries for various schools. You know well before you even buy/rent your home what school boundary that home belongs to.

Different school districts weight the location of a child's home differently when choosing which school the child should go to. In most districts location is the highest factor. In other places it's a moderate or low factor.

Sf has a lottery system to avoid all the rich kids at one school, and all the poor kids at another. It’s well motivated but totally impractical from get-kids-to-school-before-work perspective.

When I grew up, I was bussed an hour a way when I had a far nicer school in walking distance. And then a far worse school a 5 minute drive.

Logic and school districts don't usually have anything to do with one another.

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