When I started researching and writing about schools for Atlanta magazine, my son was in pre-K. Back then, AP classes, student-teacher ratios, and extracurriculars seemed a lifetime away. A decade later, Luke is a sophomore, and the Atlanta Magazine School Guide is celebrating its tenth anniversary.
Each year as we start work on this issue, I’m amazed at how many impressive educational options are available to parents in our area.
I also know—from interviewing hundreds of parents, teachers, and experts, not to mention having firsthand experience—how incredibly difficult it is to pick the perfect school for your child. There are so many things to take into consideration: academic offerings, class size, athletics, and tuition costs. It can be overwhelming because when you’re touring prospective schools, it seems that each looks better than the last.
So how do you decide?
We know you can’t go to every open house and spend hours immersing yourself in each school’s website and catalogs. So we do a lot of the homework for you. Sift through the guide to see which schools have the qualities that are important to you and your family. (And use our online version of the listings to make that search even easier.)
We hope we can help. But we know it’s not easy.
After ten years of school research, we still agonized when it came time to pick Luke’s high school. There were way too many great choices. We ended up selecting a Catholic high school that offers many of the things that appeal to us: lots of AP options, drum line, robotics, small class sizes, and an emphasis on community service. Someday, we hope he’ll forgive us for making him wear a uniform. —Mary Jo DiLonardo
This article originally appeared in our November 2013 issue.
