I'd choose that rural public school experience every time over public schools in all US cities. It was safe (a school shooting was unthinkable), zero gang or weapon problems, the focus was always on education, classes were never too crowded (easy to get individual attention from a teacher as needed), and the teachers were great overall (90% older women with decades of experience). Toward the end of my years in that public school system, drug use did begin to infest rural American schools and you could see that was about to get a lot worse. The US has changed a lot in the past 30 years, I suspect my experience is becoming increasingly rare, but there are likely still a lot of nice rural areas (it's a huge country after all).
Here is some content as not everyone has the opportunity to do this.
I work in software and she's transitioning into software as well. We could live a above comfortable lifestyle on my salary or a comfortable lifestyle on her salary.
The plan has been to build up our investment portfolio where yields cover the minimum to survive by the age of 35. This is to reduce the risk relying of the bulk of income coming from a single source.
At that point in time I'd consider looking for part time, freelance or consulting to be able to transition my primary focus into our family but also to reduce the chance of dipping into the yields from the portfolio.
With the freed up time I would homeschool and bring the children to activities for social interaction.
I don't think this environment would negatively impact them.
Yes. My wife and I started looking at buying land in mid-2020 and saw a handful of plots we were interested in. What stopped us from committing to buying one was internet service because we're both remote workers who require at least 50/10 mbit for both of us to be working without issue.
In the present it is fairly straightforward to get around no power, no water and no sewages with solar, well and septic system. If you don't have internet service though there's not much you can do to get around that.
Starlink has changed that. I suspect we'll also see an uprise in prefabricated homes as well. I want to live further out to escape the city, have a family garden, and a couple chickens but I don't want to have to build our home by hand.