We had a good experience at the Elliot when my mom fell. Only the trauma ortho there was willing to do the surgery (after bouncing around to 3 other ortho people in the area) and did a fantastic job.

Did you find that some of them were stapled in? I have a bunch of old phone cables that I want to pull, but I'm afraid to try and see if they are straight pulls or not.

I don't have any kids at Souhegan, but my thought is that they tried to differentiate themselves as a town in the past by joining the Coalition of Essential Schools and trying different things to separate themselves from the competitive nature of the Hollis/Bedford school systems, which I believe are more traditional, but also more competitive.

The philosophy that instead of raising a few rockstar students, to instead try to ensure a base level of success for all students seems to me to be the difference between Amherst and the surrounding towns.

They left the Coalition a while back, but I still think Amherst has an identity crisis as a town that doesn't know what it wants to be. I maintain that anyone with $1M to spend on a house would choose Bedford/Hollis/Nashua if they wanted to stay closer to civilization than to choose Amherst as a first pick. The rest of us with (approx) $1M homes are here because we like the big lots and privacy or something.