Manayunk happens to have an excellent public school already. Dobson can hold its own next to the Center City publics. The school already has a number of children with professional parents and there is a waiting list of people outside the area trying to get in.

Perhaps one of the biggest reasons young professionals leave Manayunk when they start a family is that they've bought into the kids=big house/big yard/one bathroom per family member mentality. I know people in four bedroom/1.5 or 2 bath rowhomes in Manayunk who don't feel that their house is "big enough" for a family. I laugh at that because I grew up the oldest of 6 in a 2.5 bedroom, 1 bath house in Germantown (the .5 bedroom fit a set of bunkbeds and nothing else). Generations of Manayunkers have raised kids in those houses but the current generation sees them as too small. Not to mention that intolerable lack of a "master suite"...