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Show HN: Lookup the school district associated with a street address in the US
I wrote a tool in Python that finds the school district associated with any given street address in the United States.
Here’s how it works:
An address corresponds to a single point on the map. The U.S Census Bureau has a geocoder that converts an address to latitude and longitude coordinates.
School district boundaries can be represented as polygons on the map. The National Center for Education Statistics (NECS) has geographic data on school district boundaries.
Once we determine which polygon the point resides in, we know the school district.
- notwhereyouare 3y agoThis 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
- thelastparadise 3y agoThis... might be a bad idea. Unfortunately there are some perverts who would love to use it for the inverse reason.
- kodt 3y agoHow 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.
- rks404 3y agothis is such a useful tool - thank you!
- akgfab 3y agoNice work! This doesn’t hold for all school districts. Some, like New Orleans post Katrina, became all-charter districts such that each school essentially operated as its own district. Other districts serve only elementary school students (as opposed to “Unified” districts). Just heads up that there are edge cases.
- Kon-Peki 3y agoThe data is probably coming from the Census [1] through the NECS that the author mentions. If so, the documentation is here [2] (starting on page 4-42) but doesn't mention anything about Louisiana having anything out of the ordinary. It calls out Vermont, Illinois and New Jersey for having some wackiness with "pseudo districts" [1] https://www.census.gov/geographies/mapping-files/time-series/geo/cartographic-boundary.html https://www.census.gov/geographies/mapping-files/time-series... [2] https://www2.census.gov/geo/pdfs/maps-data/data/tiger/tgrshp2023/TGRSHP2023_TechDoc.pdf https://www2.census.gov/geo/pdfs/maps-data/data/tiger/tgrshp...
- DenisM 3y agoAre school districts contiguous?
- cwmma 3y agoprobably not as not all municipalities are contiguous
- denimnerd42 3y agoSome even overlap.
- FinnKuhn 3y agoAs 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.?
- jmuguy 3y agoIf you're attending public school for the most part - no, you'll be assigned to a school. There are a lot of exceptions though, merit based schools you can elect to attend, lottery based systems. And of course your parents are free to pay for private school. This system does come with issues though, like parents lying about their address to get their kids into a "better" school.
- beefman 3y agoCorrect. School assignment at all levels of public school in the U.S. is determined by residence address, with the exception of the magnet and charter school systems,[1][2] which are application-based. There are also private schools. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnet_school https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnet_school [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charter_schools_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charter_schools_in_the_United_...
- SushiHippie 3y agoIn Germany, we have something similar but only for Elementary Schools (1st - 4th grade). After that, you are mostly free to choose, which school you want to attend.
- FinnKuhn 3y agoI am German, so I am familiar with our system, which is why I asked specifically about high schools ;)
- SushiHippie 3y agoAh, makes sense! Huh the world is small, I live in the city where you study ;)
- matt3210 3y ago[flagged]
- rootusrootus 3y agoThis isn't exactly new information, it is just presented differently. You could already pull up an address in Redfin (and others, I'm sure) to see what schools it is assigned to.
- pavel_lishin 3y agoDo you think folks buying houses don't already look this up? Especially people with children?
- ghaff 3y agoOf course if it really matters, you should verify. There are weird edge cases where property lines straddle district lines and town boundaries.
- gnicholas 3y agoGreat idea! I recently heard of a family that leased an expensive home (in Atherton) that was immediately adjacent to a public elementary school. They assumed it was zoned for the school that it abutted, but learned after trying to enroll their kids they discovered it was not. When you look at the district map, you can see that it extends quite a bit into Atherton, and there are many homes that are much farther away from the school that are zoned for it. Good thing they were just leasing, and hadn't bought!
- cwmma 3y agoAs somebody who's company has been involved in creating those maps and has been accused of "destroying property values and ruining lives" there are some really complex trade offs that go into these things.
- gnicholas 3y agoI can imagine things get pretty high-stakes. In this particular situation, the school district they were zoned for was very similar, but it was just much less convenient to get the kids to school in the morning. Curious about the downvotes — isn't this a relevant anecdote that shows the need for products like this one?
- BadCookie 3y agoI assume it’s because many people don’t feel the least bit sorry for a family that is wealthy enough to live in Atherton … But it’s not fair to take that out on you. I have a more extreme example. Riverdale High School near Portland, Oregon sits entirely outside of its geographic attendance zone. Riverdale might be the wealthiest district in the state. Perhaps that’s no coincidence.
- sgc 3y agoJust 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.
- turtlebits 3y agoNot to detract from this, if you don't want to install anything, you can search redfin/zillow/any MLS provider for the district as well as the assigned schools.