When you move from one country to another with children, one of the main concerns is the search for the school.
Someone once told me that in this case the most important thing was to keep the children in the same educational system. In our case, Leyre was in the British system in Spain since he was 3 years old and in Brazil he continued with the same curriculum.
The move to the United States broke all the schemes and more with only two years left to go to the University.
Obviously we didn't find any options in the Bay Area, and of course, going to the United States and not experiencing the American system did not make sense either.
The question was whether private or public school. Once again searching the internet, we found a platform called Niche. Here we could see all the opinions, rankings and qualifications of the schools. You can filter by state, city, type of school, school year. Based on these comments and ratings we make the school decision. Public schools in the Bay Area are excellent so we had no doubts.
Once you pick a school, there is a school district to go to, in our case it was the PAUSD in Palo Alto. On their website you will find all the information for registration. By law, school places must be guaranteed, as long as you have a proven place of residence. For some newcomers from another country, the documentation to provide is: Proof of rent, home purchase, bills, school grades from other schools, passport (in California immigration status is not requested), parents' passport and a medical certificate of vaccines and typhoid fever. If you don't bring the report don't worry, the medical centers here already know how to do it and the school can tell you where to do it in case you don't have health insurance yet. In our case, we registered 3 weeks before High School began and a few days before that we had a meeting with his school Councelor to choose the subjects.
Registration is very easy and they are very friendly! Oh, if they don't speak English well... don't worry, there are support classes in schools for this.
The three official languages of the school.
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