For families with children looking to rent an apartment, it makes obvious sense to live near great public schools. But in any city, there's a wide range of price levels near the best schools, and better school districts almost always mean a higher cost of living. Apartment Guide has helped simplify the dilemma by researching the best public schools in Las Vegas and identifying the most affordable neighborhoods and apartment communities near them.
We started by charting the best public schools (only those with a score between 8 and 10 using GreatSchools 1-10 scale ratings) within these Clark County School District cities:
These three cities comprise greater Las Vegas. In this article, we leave out schools in Laughlin, Nevada, which are also in the Clark County School District but are an hour and a half away from Vegas.
After studying a map of the best public schools, you’ll quickly see the same pattern we did: the highest rated schools are primarily concentrated along the edges of the metro area. In particular the top schools tend to cluster along the I-215 loop from the city’s northwest to southeast sides.
As with most school districts, Clark County has many more elementary schools than middle schools, and more middle schools than high schools, which you can observe from the color-coded dots on the map. You can also see there are a few (but not many) exceptions to the overall pattern of best schools being located along the metro’s edge.
Taking a deeper dive into the average of all school ratings within Las Vegas neighborhoods, we learned which of them offer proximity to the best schools overall. This composite score allows us to identify overall neighborhoods with the best schools across every grade level.
This is an especially important point for parents with children of different ages, or families planning to stay in an apartment for a few years, during which time kids would advance from one level to the next. When the school rating is good across all levels of schools, parents can hone in on areas where their kids will attend a good school regardless of whether they’re in elementary, middle or high school.
Conversely, one highly-rated school in an otherwise subpar school system–where the average school rating is lower–could be a red flag for renters with kids. Is it really a great school, or is something else going on that’s inflating the ratings?
By focusing on school ratings at the neighborhood level, we can locate the concentrated areas with multiple superb schools, rather than simply identifying one-off examples of highly-rated schools. Using this approach, Green Valley Ranch and MacDonald Ranch, both in Henderson, are the neighborhoods closest to the top schools overall.
Now that we've located the best areas with close proximity to good schools at every level, the next step is to determine which of these areas are most accessible to cost conscious apartment hunters.
Nationally, higher-rated schools command, on average, higher rent prices. Typically, parents can expect to pay 32% more to live near a school rated 10, than to live near one rated 5. The exception to the rule, reflected in the chart below, is in urban centers where rents are typically more expensive.
Thankfully, the extra money parents might expect to pay to live near a good school can be offset by finding one of the cheaper options within an area with high-rated schools. We’ve done the hard research for you, by looking at Las Vegas neighborhoods with great schools, and determining which of them have the most affordable housing. In other words, where are the Las Vegas neighborhoods where you’ll find the best school district bang for your buck?
Value Rank | City | Neighborhood |
---|---|---|
1 | Henderson | MacDonald Ranch |
2 | Henderson | Mission Hills |
3 | Henderson | MacDonald Highlands |
4 | Henderson | Seven Hills |
5 | Henderson | Green Valley South |
6 | Las Vegas | Summerlin |
7 | Henderson | Green Valley Ranch |
8 | Henderson | Gibson Springs |
9 | Las Vegas | The Vistas |
10 | Henderson | McCullough Hills |
To determine our value rank we’ve created a simple score that divides the average rent price for a 2 bedroom apartment in each neighborhood by the average rating of all high-rated schools in that area. The better the score, the better the overall value of the neighborhood on a cost-per-quality-school basis. The chart above represents the top 10 neighborhoods in Las Vegas for affordability near highly rated schools.
Finally, we broke down the data to reveal which specific apartment properties offer access to the best schools for the lowest average monthly rent cost. Here, we can see a list of apartments with access to high-rated schools at the elementary, middle and high school levels.
Apartment Guide’s number crunching reveals that parents who want their precious rental dollars to leverage the best possible education for their kids should strongly consider apartments in Henderson. But for parents who are just looking for proximity to the best schools at any cost, we’ve also included some specific apartments which fit that bill, in order of school ranking.
Parents with school-aged children who are looking to rent an apartment in Las Vegas can use the data here to help decide which neighborhoods and particular apartment communities offer them the best school systems for their needs. You can easily search for an apartment in Las Vegas by any of the neighborhoods or apartment complexes specified in this article by using our apartment search tool here. Happy hunting!