[lhamil64]

Also, about the "regardless of where your friends go" part, I'd say most people meet their friends in school. I guess if they moved and had to change schools that would suck but I can't think of anyone that happened to personally (other than friends who moved far away, like to another state). And the school district is often a very key factor when people with kids are looking for housing.

[FinnKuhn]

At least where I live you change the school you go to at least once and I just assumed it was the same in the US considering that there are middle and high school. So when you switch from middle to high school, I would have assumed not all of your friends end up at the same school...

[rootusrootus]

In my district (in the US), the schools are arranged in a hierarchy, and at each level the school size increases. So the middle schools each have feeder elementary schools, and no elementary cohorts get split between the middle schools. And the high school gets everyone. It's not a huge district, however (500-600 students per grade level), so it's possible other more urban areas do it differently.

The only time where a friend group can get split is if they redraw the boundaries for the elementary schools. This happens occasionally, not every year.

[aidenn0]

They are all assigned by address; so there are N elementary schools that feed into a single junior high (or middle school), and typically a junior high will feed into a single high school. So your friends move up with you unless someone moves.

This is all "typical"; there are many exceptions. Where I live now, they unified the secondary schools (i.e. junior-high and high-school) so that you can apply to go to a different junior-high or high-school than your local one, space permitting. Similarly where I grew up, you could apply to go to a different school, but a "legitimate academic reason" was required. People did game the system, most commonly by claiming they wanted to study a foreign language that was offered at the school they wanted to go to, but not the school they were in the district for.

I should note that where I grew up the school-system was unusually non-local in the sense that there was one system for the entire county (which was about half the land area of Saarland). Even then you were required to go to the local school though. More typical is that each town or city manages the schools for their area.

[johnjreiser]

This is mostly true in the US. The map is reflecting districts. I happen to be in a small town in New Jersey, so we're an elementary district with one school. Children after 6th grade go to a middle school and high school that is part of the secondary district which overlaps other municipalities/elementary districts. Some districts have multiple elementary schools and their own local level maps (not reflected here) that influence placement in the elementary schools in the district.

[lhamil64]

In my school, my district had an elementary school, middle school, & high school. So yes if you live at the same address the whole time, you and your friends would all go through each school together.

[bombcar]

As mentioned it’s often hierarchical (elementary schools being the smallest) BUT you still have people who switch to private school at the boundaries, etc.