How "bad" are the other school districts? Is that based solely on test scores?
What are your criteria for a good school? Mine were:
1) Safety - I'm not sending my kids to a school overrun by gangs
2) Emphasis on non-core subjects - I want them exposed to art and music.
3) A variety of extracurricular activities - even though I live in Friday Night Lights land, I wanted to make sure my kids had other options than sports if they wanted that
4) Has a librarian. We moved out of a great district because their answer to a tight budget was to eliminate the library staff.
5) Had an all-day GT program. My youngest needs this. Our other district pulled GT kids out for a few hours a week only and that would not have worked for my kid.
6) Has advanced academics. Even if your kids don't need it, you don't want the kids who did bored in your kids' class and causing a fuss
7) Has a large population of families who don't look like us...because the world doesn't look and act exactly like us.
Instead of moving to the suburb with the "best" school district, we moved to a good district...and we are zoned to the worst elementary school in the district. On purpose. Because where we live, test scores primarily reflect the parents' socioeconomic status. Our "worst" elementary school has lower test scores because half the kids are low-income and it's not majority white. So my kids have friends who are rich, some who are poor, some who are white and black and brown, some whose parents are recent immigrants and some whose families have lived in this area for generations. It's sparked so many awesome conversations and is so different from my childhood experience (my hometown was 99% middle-class white). We love it here and our kids are challenged and thriving...but I have friends who think we were crazy to put our kids in this district.