Think it's time to pull up stakes and move the family? If you're on the east coast, go west. And if you're on the west, you might want to go east. Family's best bet is apparently right in the middle – according to the second annual BusinessWeek report on the best place in America to raise a family.
Winning the family friendliest award this year is Mount Prospect, Ill., a Chicago suburb of fifty-six thousand. The mostly middle-class community has little crime, affordable housing and award-winning schools (the high school was just ranked twelfth in the state for public schools and its marching band just grabbed its twenty-sixth state title - no word on the number of trombones). They've got a mall and ethnic restaurants, clean air and a dearth of McMansions.
It all sounds good to me, but I was disappointed to see the metrics used to determine the best of the best. Those of us who've escaped to more rural areas (or, like me, returned to our small childhood communities) were automatically stricken from the list. BusinessWeek's rubric knocked out towns with populations of fewer than fifty thousand and median
household incomes of less than $40,000 or more than $100,000.By the same token, a drive right up the road to Chicago is apparently out of the question for these parents (despite 'Derby blogger Shannon's well-written and compelling piece relating her experience as a city parent)
Mount Prospect might well still come out on top, but I'd like to throw my little town in the ring. The nearest mall is nearly an hour's drive, but we have dairy cows for my daughter to visit just down the road. There are people keeping the heat at 60 all winter to make it through, but we have back roads where she can ride her tricycle without risk of running into a single SUV. My school had its limitations, but I could name all 600 students in grades kindergarten through twelve when I walked out the door; and every teacher who sees my daughter in the grocery store these days tells her a personal anecdote about her mother. It isn't the place for everyone, but it's a place where my husband and I have found people have an investment in one another. When someone asks about my grandfather, they want to know the answer. And in years to come, when he's long gone, they'll keep him alive for my daughter in their stories. Trade that for 50,000 neighbors and the nation's best school district? Sorry, no.
I'm not knocking the true 'burbs, but does a mall really make the town? Do poor people break it? Check out the report and see if your town made the cut.
Image: Village of Mount Prospect
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