And know many families that enroll in Ames despite being in the Gilbert district. It goes both ways depending on priorities.
Ames gets far more open enrolling in as a general number than out. Yes, there are certainly people that move to North Ames for the Gilbert school district. I know a ton of people in both, and nearly all of the people that purposely got their kids into Gilbert were small town Iowa people that are now in Central Iowa. It's probably just closer to what they are used to vs. Ames.
But it's not hard to look at general statistics for education and success and once you normalize for socioeconomic factors, it becomes pretty clear that schools being great are about the kids that go there much more than the schools themselves. If you take the exact kid that's high performing, they are going to have more opportunities in Ames. If you had students that needed extra support, I'm not sure, maybe Gilbert would be better. I know kids that struggled in Ames and thrived in Gilbert, and vice versa.
Both are great schools in my opinion. Of people I know that live within the Gilbert school district lines, about half stay in Gilbert, and half open enroll to Ames. But I think that's skewed do to at least some of those acquaintances occurring through my kids being in Ames schools.
There were also a lot of problem a few years ago in AHS, but it seems like the problems with fights have been pretty non-existent the last couple of years. There were a few factors that came together at the same time:
1. The design and flow of the new school simply made it way easier to monitor and minimize those situations
2. The opening of the alternate school or whatever it's called has gotten kids that need to be out of the general HS environment out
3. Whether it's change in people or attitude of the admin, they basically started actually figuring out that some kids just shouldn't be in school. They were so soft kids that were serious problems they just let continue to come to school and they needed to be gone.
There was a time a few years ago that it was bad and we considered getting our kids elsewhere, but to AHS's credit, they really took it seriously and got their **** together in short order.