When I saw that an Orange County city had been named among the 10 best places in the country for families, I figured it must be Irvine. It's constantly ranked America's safest city after all.
When I discovered the rankings were based on public-school districts, I KNEW it had to be Irvine.
Just shows I've got some edumacating to do on meeself as Irvine–safe and smart and stucco-infused Irvine–did not draw iron.
Los Alamitos was the chosen one, according to the number crunchers over at Zip Realty.
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The top 10, in order and identified by school districts, were:
1. Delano Public School District in Minneapolis
2. Fort Mill School District in Charlotte, N.C.
3. Lovejoy Independent School District in Dallas
4. St. Charles C.U.S.D in Chicago
5. Harvard public schools in Boston
6. Lake Oswego School District in Portland, Ore.
7. Nanuet Union Free School District in Westchester (north of New York City)
8. Eanes Independent School District in Austin, Tex.
9. Los Alamitos Unified School District
10. Mercer Island School District in Seattle
To narrow down the list, Zippernecks analyzed the highest-rated public school districts based on test scores in 23 metropolitan areas nationwide and the median prices per square foot for real estate in those districts to see how accessible property was (which might explain by relatively pricey Irvine did not make the cut).
Email: mc****@oc******.com. Twitter: @MatthewTCoker. Follow OC Weekly on Twitter @ocweekly or on Facebook!
OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.