A police officer during a neighborhood watch meeting, said, just keep your doors and windows locked, don’t stay out after dark and don’t open your doors without a rottweiler. The schools are horrid, hope you plan on Catholic schools or homeschooling.
Look, surely that depends on neighborhood/area. If a neighborhood watch officer said that applies to all of Texas, he’s grossly misinformed.
I wasn’t born here, but I got here as fast as I could. Literally. As in, I packed my car with everything I owned and drove down here from the Midwest ten days after I turned 18. Haven’t regretted it a moment since.
I’ve lived in Fort Worth, Dallas, and the Houston area (albeit not in Houston per se).
The schools vary. Yep, a lot of them are bad. On the other hand, one of Fort Worth’s public high schools is ranked consistently in the top 5-10 public high schools
nationwide. If you’re considering using the public schools, check into the districts before buying a house.
One really awesome thing about Texas public schools is that, if you’re considering homeschooling, your homeschooled child can participate in extracurriculars with his or her school district. So, if you want your kid to do the sorts of things that aren’t really feasible when homeschooling (marching band, a large, competent choir, competitive sports, etc), you can simply enroll them in those activities in the district in which you live. Texas also has a program wherein juniors and seniors in high school (and yes, this includes homeschoolers) can enroll in their local community colleges and take classes for free. This is really good for four reasons: first, some courses are near-impossible to teach competently at home (chemistry, for example), but at a CC, your kid will have access to a solid lab and good teachers; second, it’s a great way to ease the kid into college while still living at home; third, they can get two years of college credit and an associate degree completed for free; and fourth, when they transfer to a four-year university, the university will look very kindly indeed on a student who has stellar grades from a CC. (All that assuming, of course, that you aren’t planning on sending your kid to the Ivies.)
Oh, and our in-state college tuition rates are extremely low…plus, should he get into A&M, he’ll get into the biggest Catholic college in the South.
Texas A&M has a MARVELOUS Catholic student program. St. Mary’s, the church next door to campus, provides everything from solid Catholic priests who give good spiritual direction (A&M has more religious vocations come out of it than any other college, Catholic included, nationally), classes on NFP, bible studies, service projects, run a pro-life student group…the works.
Yep, there are some bad neighborhoods. There are certain areas of Fort Worth, Dallas, and Houston that you couldn’t pay me to live in. Name me one major city in any other state where that’s not the case.
While I came from the Midwest, I’ve never found people here to be anything but warm and welcoming to newcomers. A lot of people move to Texas; it’s where the jobs are! Admittedly, I’ve never lived in a small town here, so it may be different there, but in the big cities, at least, you’ll find people delighted to have you here. Houston actually has a wider ethnic cross-section than New York at this point: lots of people from everywhere from the Middle East to Central/South America to Africa to the Far East to India. Oil brought a lot of them, Houston being Oil Central. Yet we all (well, except for some gangs, but you’ll get those anywhere) get along pretty darn well, and we care about each other.
Let me give you a classic example.
The first week I lived in Texas, I was invited to sing with a choir downtown. Bear in mind that this is pre-GPS. I managed to find the church in question through a combination of a map and sheer dumb luck, but I had no idea how to get home. After rehearsal, I asked the guy (middle-aged, born-n-bred-in-Texas) who’d invited me to join the choir if he could give me directions. He thought for a moment. “Don’t tell me where you live*. Just tell me an intersection where, if you got there, you could find your way home.” I gave him the name of an intersection. “Okay. See my truck over there? Just follow me. I’ll take you there.” He drove, I later learned, a good 15+ minutes out of his way just to make sure I’d get home safely. That’s pretty much how Texans are.
(ETA: correct phrasing)
