Considering move to Cincinnati area (Dayton, Mason: houses, employment, neighborhoods)

[jandjhall]

Hello,
We are hoping to relocate to the Cincinnati area in the next year. We have four children, and three of them see a specialist located at Cincinnati Children's hospital, so we would like to be within that hospitals local area. They have clinics as far north as Mason and West Chester, and are building one in Liberty Township as well. We also have family living in Troy, that we would like to be somewhat close to.

We are coming out in September for our boys to have surgery and will be in the area for 1-2 weeks and would like to start looking at communities where we might want to live, to get a better feel for the area. We are familiar with the Dayton/Troy area, because of family, and really like that area. However, we need to be closer to Cincinnati for the medical services. We need a good school district for special needs (we have IEP's for speech services and our boys are on the Autistic spectrum as well). We want to be near family, however, we have therapy visits weekly, and doctor visits monthly or more, and would prefer for those to be within a clinic connected to the hospital.

We are looking for an area with lots of trees, good special needs services, larger yards in a good walkable neighborhood, or else something with small acreage, convenient to traveling down to Cincy for the hospital and also to see family in Troy, good parks or playgrounds nearby, and a larger contemporary type church. We would love to find a house in the $150-$200k range if possible. Any advice on areas or cities to look in next month would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks,
Jennifer

[Sunnydee]

Mason and West Chester school districts are very good and would both get you closer to the Dayton area since they are on the north side of the city.

[wastina]

You may well be interested in neighborhoods around Princeton City Schools, at the northern edge of Cincinnati. This district buys in to neighborhood schools, and has a very strong program catering to students with IEPs. I am a graduate of the district and subbed there across all schools and grades for 18 months. I was trully impressed by the quality of education and the inclusion provided to all students, from slower learners to high acheivers. I worked with austic kids at the primary and middle school; the student:teacher ratio is quite high, and the degrees of specialized learning was trully impressive. The district has some nuances on demographic, although there are some "magnet schools" for special categories (SBH and ESL, for example). You might want to look at Evendale, Stewart, Sprindgale and Sharonville primary schools in the district. Those neighborhoods all have housing within your house range (with feeder employment being GE and Ethicon, a Johnson& Johnson subsidiary). Plus, the schools have all been rebuilt afresh (Evendale and Glendale are scheduled to reopen this year, I think: the others are 2? years old) and are state of the art, with interactive smartboards, good layout, great playgrounds, etc. I feel obliged to also plug Glendale, which is in the district and has the smallest class size. It has the nicest "community" feel, and houses are available in your price range, although will be smaller than what you can find in other areas of the district. In all neighborhoods you can find nice homes with large yards and walkable communities to recreation and local shopping. Larger shopping (Tri County mall, Walmart, Borders, Dicks and all the usual suspects), restaurants, groceries, etc are within a 10 minute drive from all neighborhoods.

Please do give Princeton consideration. The administration of all schools should be interested to meet with you to talk about what the school provides, and I think you'll be impressed.

Good luck!


Good luck with your hunt and let me know if I can answer