Finding our school: how a waitress, a spreadsheet, and a mad dash led us to Cronulla South

If you ask me how we ended up at Cronulla South Primary School, I will tell you honestly that the short answer is a waitress at an Italian restaurant and one questionable Google search result.

The longer answer starts before we even left Texas.

Getting the kids enrolled in an Australian public school isn't something you do when you arrive - it's part of the visa process. We had to register the kids with the New South Wales government from the US, and pay upfront to cover their enrollment fees. It was a decent amount of money, and it was just the beginning of learning that moving your children across the world involves a level of bureaucratic homework nobody puts in the brochure.

Once that was done, we assumed the hard part was over. We were wrong.

When we arrived in Sydney, we were staying in Erskineville in the Inner West, and I did what I always do - I Googled everything. Top 10 primary schools in New South Wales. Top 10 public primary schools in Sydney. Top 10 schools near the Inner West. I built a spreadsheet. I made a list. I felt very organized and prepared.

The schools that kept coming up were all farther inland, not particularly convenient to public transit, and not especially close to my university campus. We were already starting to feel like the Inner West, as much as we loved it, wasn't quite right for our family. It was vibrant and creative and endlessly interesting to walk around - but with two kids who hadn't found many other kids to play with, and a growing sense that we were loud and disruptive in a neighborhood built for young professionals, something felt off.

Then we went to Pino's.

Photo courtesy of Google user: Eunice

It's a local Italian restaurant in Erskineville - there's actually one in Cronulla too, which means I now find myself occasionally scanning the tables there hoping to spot her - and our waitress that night asked us what kind of lifestyle we were looking for. We admitted we wanted coastal. Laid back. Access to the beach. Adam and I kept being reminded that we are not really city people at heart. We love visiting it, we love the energy, but living in it with kids just wasn't feeling like us.

She pointed us straight to Cronulla. Beach access, beautiful coastline, she compared it to an Italian coastline. Great schools. Train access. More affordable than the Inner West. She even sent us home with a blank receipt with lists of things to check out in the area. We went the next weekend and fell in love. The rest, as they say, is history - except it wasn't quite that simple.

Photo: Vaida Savickaite

Once we'd decided on Cronulla, we needed to figure out which school. Another round of Google searches turned up a document that appeared to rank Cronulla South Primary higher than Cronulla Primary. We took that as gospel. We found our apartment specifically within the Cronulla South catchment zone, signed a lease, and committed fully to a school we had chosen based on one ranking from one source we never verified.

I will come back to that.

But first - the mad dash.

We visited Cronulla South on either Thursday or Friday before the school year started on Monday. The principal and assistant principal were warm and welcoming in a way that immediately felt different from what we were used to. Our neighborhood elementary school back in Prosper had over 1,000 students - around 200 to 250 kids per grade. Cronulla South has 250 students total, kindergarten through year six. The classrooms have views of the beach. They told us you can watch whale migrations from the school grounds. We were sold.

Photo courtesy of Cronulla South Public School website landing page.

But we were not ready.

We still needed to finalize the enrollment through the NSW government website, which required proof of address, catchment zone confirmation, a formal request, and what felt like an unreasonable amount of perseverance to push through in the time we had. We also needed school supplies, which meant a trip to Officeworks that I can only describe as organized chaos. Every other family in Cronulla apparently also left this to the last minute. The school supply list included items with names I had never encountered - thank goodness for a few Texan friends who had warned me about some of the terminology differences. We got through it.

And then we needed uniforms, which we did not manage to get before Monday.

So on the first day of school, while every other family was doing drop off, we were at the school's uniform shop doing sizing. The school secretary - and I will not forget her kindness - quietly handed us a few pieces of gently used clothing from their secondhand stock, no charge, so the kids would have something to wear. We ordered the rest online and had it delivered to the school the next day.

Ellie and Remy started on Tuesday.

We were still in our Airbnb in North Cronulla at that point, which meant their first week involved a bus ride to school. I remember standing at the stop with them in their brand new uniforms, Adam beside me, both of us sending first-day photos back to everyone in Texas who had been waiting for this moment. They looked absolutely adorable. They felt absolutely weird about it.

First day of Aussie school outside our Airbnb

Cronulla South has two campuses - the younger years on one, the older years on another - which meant Ellie and Remy weren't even walking in together. They each had to find their own way into a new school, in a new country, knowing nobody, with an accent that set them apart from the first word they spoke.

Remy is our shy one. He hadn't wanted to leave Texas, hadn't wanted to leave his friends, and here he was being sent into a classroom full of strangers without even his sister nearby. The mom guilt that morning was strong. But I watched him walk toward those gates, and he didn't look back. Not once. He just walked in, ready to handle it, like the brave kid he has grown into this past year.

I cried a little. Obviously.

Four months later, both kids love their teachers, have made real friends, and have integrated in ways that genuinely make me proud. The walkability of our apartment to the school - something we didn't have in those first Airbnb weeks - has become one of our favorite things about where we live.

Now. About that Google search.

I'm fairly confident my source was wrong. From everything I've seen and heard since, Cronulla Primary is likely the stronger school - larger, better resourced, more established. Cronulla South is small and close-knit, which has its own charm, but small and close-knit also means kids who have grown up together since kindergarten and tight social circles that are genuinely harder to break into as the new kid.

We've quietly wondered whether we should consider moving them. The honest answer is probably not. The convenience, the relationships the kids have built, and the disruption it would cause aren't worth it, especially when we're not sure exactly how long we'll be here. But if I were doing it again with what I know now? I'd be looking at Cronulla Primary.

I share that not to be negative about Cronulla South, which has been genuinely good to our family, but because this blog is supposed to be honest. And if there's another expat family out there about to make school decisions based on one unverified ranking document they found at 11 pm - hi, learn from me.

The kids are thriving. We found our village. And somewhere in a restaurant in Cronulla, there may be a waitress who has no idea how significantly one dinner conversation changed the trajectory of our entire Sydney life.

If you're reading this - thank you.