- Parents (or students) deciding between which schools to choose
- Educational advocates to determine where to target their efforts and resources?
- School administrators evaluating their own school against others?
There are hundreds of schools throughout the district and parents and students may not know all of their options.Likewise, it can be difficult to keep up with changes in the process of applying to schools for even the most plugged-in parents.
Parents (or students) want clear guidance about schools, to make sure that they can choose a school that's going to give their student (or themselves) the best opportunities to excel, coupled with the best alignment with their interests.
Choosing a school can be a long process. Initially, there is a lot of exploring of the space: what are my neighborhood schools? What are the schools I can apply to outside of my neighborhood.
Once they have an idea of the general landscape, the may start to ask bigger questions (e.g., if I wanted to be in the catchment for school X, how much would it cost to live there?).
Finally, at the point where they have an idea of what schools they should target, they have to find the criteria for and navigate the process of gaining admission to those schools.
User stories:
- As a parent, I want to be able to share schools or lists of schools with a permalink, so that I can get input from friends, family, or other trusted members of my community.
- As a parent, I want to be able to compare the data points about schools side-by-side, so that I can quickly see how they compare against each other along available metrics.
- As a student, I want to see the distance of a school from my home, so that I can factor travel time in to my evaluation
- As a parent new to school research, I want a plain-language step-by-step wizard for narrowing down schools, so that I can be guided through a process that may have unfamiliar language along a number of dimensions that I'm not yet aware of.
Features:
- A map that shows the locations and types of schools
- A list that show some high-level information about each school, and links to things like teacher reviews, news and media, or social media
- Widgets that allow for sorting the school list
- Widgets that allow for filtering which schools are displayed
- Able to select schools in the list to highlight
- Clicking on a school on the map or in the list highlights the corresponding school in the list or on the map.
- Map shows school catchment areas for selected schools
- (stretch) Hilighting a school adds to schools compare (demographics, scores, college admission rates, pipeline schools (i.e., where do kids end up next), etc.)
- (stretch) A wizard interface that uses plain language to present each of the school search options.