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Show HN: Lookup the school district associated with a street address in the US

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Re: Show HN: Lookup the school district associated with a street address in the US

#32

Post by peterangular »

aidenn0 wrote: post #26
FinnKuhn wrote: post #6

As someone not from the US, does this mean you don't get to choose the high school you go to and it is only determined by your address regardless of where you friends go, etc.?

Yes the government-provided schooling tends to be hyper-local in the US, though there are exceptions. This was (along with other things) used to avoid regulations banning racial segregation of schools (since neighborhoods were already segregated due to policies like redlining). When people perceive one school to be better than another, they may use various forms of fraud to get their children into the school; using t…

> When people perceive one school to be better than another

Often there's more to it than just perception. My parents moved to a smaller suburb so my brother and I could attend schools with higher standardized test scores, lower class sizes, less violent incidents, more extracurricular activities, and ultimately _a lot_ more funding. Both districts were public. They made this decision looking at publicly accessible data in the 80s/90s.

Looking back, it was objectively one of the best decisions they made for our future... if not the best.

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Sure - address fraud is very common in regards to getting your kid to a better education opportunity but when there are stark, vast differences between districts I have a hard time blaming people. Especially given my anecdotal experience.

Re: Show HN: Lookup the school district associated with a street address in the US

#33

Post by kodt »

thelastparadise wrote: post #30
notwhereyouare wrote: post #2

This might help with a project i've been toying with. obviously US focused, but parse all the school calendars I could find and then query the dataset for like "when is the best time I could go XYZ and see as few school kids as possible" would look at schools in the area and look at all the calendars and show the time where the majority of schools are in session

This... might be a bad idea. Unfortunately there are some perverts who would love to use it for the inverse reason.

How so? I don't think it is especially difficult to find children and I don't see how this would help perverts.

This seems more useful for example finding out when statistically there be the least amount of families traveling to Disney World, or a particular beach in Florida etc.. by avoiding the most common Spring Break weeks.

Re: Show HN: Lookup the school district associated with a street address in the US

#34

Post by kodt »

kirubakaran wrote: post #22
henriquecm8 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am from Brazil, I don't know how it is in other parts of the country, but there are no restrictions here as far as I know. I heard of people that would study in the school in the other side of the city because it was considered the best school. But there is a limit of how many students a school can accept, so they need to enroll as soon as possible. And I think they need to arrange their own way to get to school, b…

100k would be considered small. San Francisco has 800k people, and it is considered small.

San Francisco is considered small? Its a top 20 city in terms of population.

Re: Show HN: Lookup the school district associated with a street address in the US

#35

Post by zem »

kodt wrote: post #34
kirubakaran wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

100k would be considered small. San Francisco has 800k people, and it is considered small.

San Francisco is considered small? Its a top 20 city in terms of population.

i live there and i think of it as medium sized, but then again i'm from india :) 800k would make the top 100 in india, but certainly not the top 20.

Re: Show HN: Lookup the school district associated with a street address in the US

#36

Post by rootusrootus »

FinnKuhn wrote: post #12
lhamil64 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also, about the "regardless of where your friends go" part, I'd say most people meet their friends in school. I guess if they moved and had to change schools that would suck but I can't think of anyone that happened to personally (other than friends who moved far away, like to another state). And the school district is often a very key factor when people with kids are looking for housing.

At least where I live you change the school you go to at least once and I just assumed it was the same in the US considering that there are middle and high school. So when you switch from middle to high school, I would have assumed not all of your friends end up at the same school...

In my district (in the US), the schools are arranged in a hierarchy, and at each level the school size increases. So the middle schools each have feeder elementary schools, and no elementary cohorts get split between the middle schools. And the high school gets everyone. It's not a huge district, however (500-600 students per grade level), so it's possible other more urban areas do it differently.

The only time where a friend group can get split is if they redraw the boundaries for the elementary schools. This happens occasionally, not every year.

Re: Show HN: Lookup the school district associated with a street address in the US

#38

Post by sgc »

Just a heads up that this is sometimes not the information you are looking for. My city has one school district, but there are then individual school boundaries within that district - which is what everyone really cares about. Not even the county provided gis data has the individual school boundaries, you have to get it directly from the city.
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