There is a great "opportunity cost" for a kid, or maybe that's not the right expression, of leaving one school and going to another. For me, I moved and change

There is a great "opportunity cost" for a kid, or maybe that's not the right expression, of leaving one school and going to another. For me, I moved and changed schools my senior year of high school. I was happy to do it. I had lots of friends at my old high school, my parents bought a business that was located an hour from our residence, and they pitched the idea of buying a house and moving. I was in a private school, Catholic, but professed atheist so not very popular with my religion teacher, among other religious teachers, and it was causing my overall GPA to suffer when I had long been a Straight-A student. I switched to a public school more local to the business, graduated third in my class (better than my previous rank in about equal class size), and wound up being able to go to RIT (Rochester, NY) on a decent set of scholarships, with lots of help from my parents. But more importantly I had just recently gotten really good at making friends, and recognized that taking a year to make some new friends before going off to college was going to be good practice for later. Anyway, there was no end to the line of people ready to tell me how good it was of me to go along with the idea in my last year of high school, and to not throw tantrums or put up a zillion roadblocks, tell my parents they were ruining my social life by making me change schools, or feeling any of the thousand other ways that a teenage kid can feel gravely slighted by their parents or family when they need to move or make some other major change for some reason, when they are just trying to go on living their lives and do what's best. A lot of my friends would not have been nearly so happy to move and change schools, I'll admit that. I mentioned enough things that went well, so it's also easy to recognize that any of those things could have turned out differently.