How we Chose Oakville and our Specific Public School

We chose to live in the town of Oakville, a highly regarded, highly recommended and upscale community, as the first step, in trying to make the Public Schools work. Oakville (pop. 170,000), is part of the Halton School District, which serves four towns and 51,000 students. The Halton School District, and especially Oakville is recognized for being one of the strongest school systems in Ontario. In a 2006 EQAO ranking of the entire Ontario Province, the Halton Catholic Board ranked 5th out of 72 School Boards in the entire Ontario Province. The Halton Public Board ranked 23rd.Once we decided on the town of Oakville, we took numerous steps to try to determine that we were going into one of the better Oakville schools, as Oakville has over 150 elementary schools, most being JK-8. We reviewed standardized testing scores (EQAO’s) from the Oakville schools and considered only homes in school zones that scored in the top quartile of Oakville schools. In the end, we chose to use the Catholic Schools that served the area of town we had chosen to live in. Our children spent the 2007-08 school year at Mother Teresa School in Oakville. It was apparent within the first month that the Ontario Curriculum is approximately one to 1 ½ years behind the Michigan curriculum and the school we came from. Though our children found the school to be generally warm and welcoming, though they made friends and were comfortable in the school, the academics were a repeat of their prior years in the US. This surprising discovery led us to dig deeper into a comparison of the Ontario schools and ultimately to pull them out and put them into a Private School we felt better matched the US education/curriculum.