Austin schools 2026: districts, ratings, Eanes costs

We chose West Lake Hills for Eanes ISD and specifically for Westlake High School, because Maddie was a junior coming from Newton South and both are on the short list of public high schools an Ivy admissions reader will not reflexively discount. The premium is in the house, not tuition. Our 3,400 square footer was $1.15 million in November 2025 against $680,000 for comparable square footage in the Leander ISD part of Cedar Park.

That is the Eanes tax, and it is $470,000. The school exceeded every reference check. Maddie's AP Lit teacher went to Vassar in 1994 and runs English like a small private school.

The counselor, Mr. Almanza, gave her a 47-minute transcript meeting her first week and found a US History elective she could take pass-fail because she had already covered the material. That attention would have cost $35,000 a year in Boston.

What I was not ready for was the social friction. Westlake kids have known each other since fourth grade. Maddie ate lunch in Mr.

Almanza's office for three weeks in September. She is fine now, on the debate team, which had three open slots for juniors. Evan at Hill Country Middle found his people in a week because eighth grade is about to scatter anyway.

I would pick Eanes again.

My daughter tested into LASA as a freshman in spring 2024, which rewrote the entire district math for our move. We were three weeks from a signed offer on a Round Rock ISD house that would have cost us an 18-mile commute and the life we wanted. The LASA letter came March 8 and we tore up the offer in 24 hours.

The thing to know: the LASA admissions test is in January. You have to be a registered AISD student or have a signed letter of intent before the test. AISD does not advertise this.

We learned it from Dr. Huang at a Mueller neighborhood picnic; she sent us a twenty-page PTA PDF from 2019. Without it we would not have known.

LASA itself is a public magnet with the academic profile of a $40,000-a-year private. My daughter has a biology teacher running a UT research program and a math department teaching multivariable calculus to juniors. What is hard: LASA is at 7309 Lazy Creek Drive, a 19-minute drive from Mueller, and carpool is a coordination problem because kids are drawn from all of AISD.

What I was not ready for: LASA has no serious sports team. My daughter was a competitive swimmer. She runs cross-country now for a coach named Rylan Osorio.

That is a trade I would make again.

We budgeted for Eanes ISD. We lost three bidding wars between April and June 2022, which is how we ended up in a Cedar Park 4/3 inside the Leander ISD boundary at $624,000 against $940,000 twelve miles east. Caleb started fifth grade at River Ridge Elementary in August 2022 and Eli started second.

The school was built in 2019 and has the physical things that mean everything: a STEM lab with four 3D printers, a librarian named Mrs. Dorman, a gym with working AC in September, and a pickup lane that does not need a police officer. I had not realized how much I wanted those.

Leander's consistency is the story. Every elementary has the same STEM lab; the PTAs are funded at a level I had only seen in Newton. The River Ridge fall festival raised $87,000 in 2023 and I wrote $4,200 of checks to family-owned taco trucks and a DJ named Esteban.

Caleb is in fifth grade GT doing eighth-grade math with eleven other kids. He would have had that in Eanes or Round Rock too. My husband commutes to Round Rock; my job is remote to Denver.

The commute delta to Eanes was eight minutes for him, zero for me, not enough to justify $316,000 more in house. Eanes is better on the margin. It is not $316,000 better.

Ezra is in the 2-year-old room at Little Land Park Preschool on Airport Boulevard at $2,275 a month. We got in off the waitlist in January 2025, four months after the move, because a family moved to Portland. Friends told us to get on the waitlist the day we got the Austin offer.

We did, and it still took four months. His teacher Carla has been in the 2-year-old room eleven years and is the only person besides Jon who has made me cry in a good way since we moved. On day three she moved Ezra into the older group's circle time one morning a week without asking, because 'he is reading the faces of the four-year-olds and the twos cannot give him that.'

That is the attention I thought we would have to pay $3,800 a month for at a Park Slope Montessori. The elementary conversation is the one I am already losing sleep about. Mueller zones to Maplewood, a solid AISD school that is not the LASA pipeline.

Families at Little Land Park are already triaging: ride Maplewood and gamble on Kealing Middle's magnet, pay $32,000 to St. Andrew's or $34,000 to Regents, or move to Eanes. Ezra is 2.5 and I am planning a magnet application four years out.

I did not come here for this.

We bought in Teravista specifically because Round Rock ISD feeds Westwood High School, a top-five Texas public that is not in Eanes. Arjun and I were both 36. We had not started IVF.

The thing nobody tells you is that district research is part of the IVF decision. If round one had worked we needed the house and the district already right at 38. If we had bought downtown and been parents by 40 we would have owed a second move's closing costs we could not afford.

I spent a Friday in March 2023 driving to three Round Rock ISD schools at dismissal, which a childless 36-year-old probably should not do. I was looking at parents. I am Indian American.

I wanted to see whether a hypothetical kid would sit at a table with anyone who looked like them. Westwood's dismissal line is 30 percent Asian, 50 percent white, 20 percent other, most parents in professional clothes. Round Rock High is more mixed, more working class.

McNeil sits in between. That parking-lot sociology tells you what the academic data cannot. Inside Round Rock ISD there are three high schools and they are not interchangeable.

The seller will not tell you. The realtor will not volunteer it. You will find out at a kindergarten tour six years from now.