Great schools: which do we choose!? (Fort Collins: rental, credit, homes)

[FTCboundfamilia]

Hi,
We are moving into the FtC area soon for my husbands job, and I am having a hard time deciding where to look for a rental home! With so many top notch schools I just don't know where to start!

Here is an overview of our family:We are a youngish family in our mid and early thirties with kids 6,9. We are moving from a mountain town in Colorado. We are super active - biking, mtn biking, gardening, hiking, snow sports, A LOT. Our kids are in gifted and talented, we (adults) are both artists.
We arent looking for a "new" home, we like the look and feel of 1960-1980 homes and we like the fact that they tend to have larger yards. We currently have like 11 kids on our block for our kids to play with, downt he street from a park, live a block from a great brewery and we ride bikes to and from the grocery store etc all the time.

Can any of you make suggestions on areas we ought to look? I know we can't have it all, but something sort of close to this would be amazing!

Thank you so much for your help

[Mike Weber]

In Fort Collins, you are seldom farther than a few blocks from a park. There are enough grocery stores in town that riding to one is pretty easy unless you are in the far south-west or north-west parts of town. The areas of town that were built during the decades you mention tend, very generally, to be between Prospect Road on the north and Harmony Road on the south. When I returned to town after 7 years in a mountain resort town, I chose to live on the west side of Fort Collins for the proximity to the mountain biking, hiking, and relative ease of getting out of town on my road bike.

If you can find a home within 1 - 1.5 miles north or south of Drake Road, you will find a lot of what you desire from a neighborhood, as far as proximity to parks and shopping, age of home, and lot size.

The Lexington Green and Village West subdivisions have homes built in the 60's and 70's with mature landscaping and large lots. The neighborhood pool always seems to have lots of kids, but I don't know on which streets they live. The neighborhood is bordered on the east by a large regional park, with a grocery and shopping area on the SW part of the neighborhood. The Spring Creek bike path that runs across the entire town skirts these neighborhoods on the east side, so access to other parks and the foothills is easy.

Good luck!
Mike Weber

[barefootmeg]

As Mike said, parks are everywhere. We lived for a year in the Rogers Park neighborhood while our Old Town home was being worked on. We came to love the neighborhood. We were right down the street from a farm, a horse pasture, a llama farm, and an informal dog run. We were also right around the corner from Rogers park which is a great summer time park because it has mature trees. (So does City Park. But many other parks in town have only small trees which really don't provide any shade. It can make all the difference on a hot day.) There were several kids of varying ages in the area. King Soopers was within easy biking distance. And if the mailboxes made out of snow boards and kayaks are any indication, there are many very active folks in the neighborhood.

I think the schools for that neighborhood are Bauder (although Lab School, in the old Moore school building, is closer. Moore used to be the school for that neighborhood.), Lincoln and Poudre. My kids have all attended Lincoln and we absolutely love the school. The teachers are fantastic and the principal is a really great guy. My son is currently in the IB program at Poudre. IB stands for International Baccalaureate which, as the name implies, means it's an international program. If you decide to travel to another part of the world and your kids are in IB here, they can go to an IB school anywhere else and the curriculum will all follow the same format and process. And if you graduate from IB as a senior, many colleges give a year's worth of college credit.

[FTCboundfamilia]

Thank you BOTH! So informative and I truly appreciate all your opinions Thank you for being so helpful