Neighborhood:: The Villages of Montgomery Run
Location:: Ellicott City (Howard County)
Average sales price:: $200,000 (January through June)
Notable features:: This condo community is like many other condo communities, architecturally speaking, but it's got location to recommend it if you want good public schools and quick access to highways. Montgomery Run is cradled between Routes 108 and 100. And it's in the district for Bellows Spring Elementary School, which beats both the state and county overall on test scores for math and reading.
The neighborhood is next to a new shopping center, so you can walk to get your Starbucks coffee fix, and it's a short drive from the restaurants at Route 108 and Snowden River Parkway.
Howard is the most expensive county in the metro area, so it's not easy to find whole neighborhoods - of any significant size - with homes under $250,000. Harder still to find a neighborhood that qualifies on price and also sends children to an elementary school with higher test scores than the high Howard County average.
That's what clinched the Villages of Montgomery Run for me. (A grateful thank you to the Greater Baltimore Board of Realtors, which ran sales numbers for me so I could narrow in on neighborhoods that qualified on price.)
At Bellows Spring Elementary this year, 94 percent of students who took the Maryland School Assessment earned a "proficient" or "advanced" score in math. That compares with 88 percent of Howard County elementary students and 78 percent of Maryland elementary students.
On the reading test, 96 percent of Bellows Spring students earned a proficient or advanced score, also besting the county and state.
(The middle school for Montgomery Run, Bonnie Branch, outperformed the state on the math and reading assessments. It had fewer proficient scores than Howard County overall, but more advanced scores.)
You can't always judge a school by its test scores, but Laurie Lerman, president of the Bellows Spring parent-teacher association, raves about the place.
"Parents love it. It's a fantastic elementary school," said Lerman, whose elder daughter started at the school when it opened in 2003 and whose younger daughter is now a fifth-grader there. "The staff are very committed to the children. They work extremely hard, and they care about each individual child and making sure each individual child gets the absolute best out of their experience."
About this series
With help from readers, The Baltimore Sun's Real Estate Wonk blog selected 10 nice, affordable and off-the-radar places as "hidden-gem neighborhoods." This is one of the 10.