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Show HN: Lookup the school district associated with a street address in the US (github.com)

58 points by codebyamir ↗ HN
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.

50 comments

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notwhereyouare
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

thelastparadise
This... might be a bad idea.

Unfortunately there are some perverts who would love to use it for the inverse reason.

kodt
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.

rks404
this is such a useful tool - thank you!
akgfab
Nice 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.
DenisM
Are school districts contiguous?
cwmma
probably not as not all municipalities are contiguous
FinnKuhn
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.?
jmuguy
If 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.

SushiHippie
In 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
I am German, so I am familiar with our system, which is why I asked specifically about high schools ;)
SushiHippie
Ah, makes sense!

Huh the world is small, I live in the city where you study ;)

FinnKuhn
damn, the world really is small
lhamil64
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.
FinnKuhn
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...
lhamil64
In my school, my district had an elementary school, middle school, & high school. So yes if you live at the same address the whole time, you and your friends would all go through each school together.
johnjreiser
This is mostly true in the US. The map is reflecting districts. I happen to be in a small town in New Jersey, so we're an elementary district with one school. Children after 6th grade go to a middle school and high school that is part of the secondary district which overlaps other municipalities/elementary districts. Some districts have multiple elementary schools and their own local level maps (not reflected here) that influence placement in the elementary schools in the district.
aidenn0
They are all assigned by address; so there are N elementary schools that feed into a single junior high (or middle school), and typically a junior high will feed into a single high school. So your friends move up with you unless someone moves.

This is all "typical"; there are many exceptions. Where I live now, they unified the secondary schools (i.e. junior-high and high-school) so that you can apply to go to a different junior-high or high-school than your local one, space permitting. Similarly where I grew up, you could apply to go to a different school, but a "legitimate academic reason" was required. People did game the system, most commonly by claiming they wanted to study a foreign language that was offered at the school they wanted to go to, but not the school they were in the district for.

I should note that where I grew up the school-system was unusually non-local in the sense that there was one system for the entire county (which was about half the land area of Saarland). Even then you were required to go to the local school though. More typical is that each town or city manages the schools for their area.

rootusrootus
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.

bombcar
As mentioned it’s often hierarchical (elementary schools being the smallest) BUT you still have people who switch to private school at the boundaries, etc.
nineplay
As someone from the US - does this mean there are places where students are free to go to any high school they wish? Could this result in overcrowding if all the students want to go to the same school?
henriquecm8
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, because it's not a route the school bus would make.

Bear in mind that my city has around 100 thousand inhabitants, I don't know if this considered small or medium in US.

kirubakaran
100k would be considered small. San Francisco has 800k people, and it is considered small.
kodt
San Francisco is considered small? Its a top 20 city in terms of population.
zem
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.
kirubakaran
Wow TIL! And I've been living in SF for over 10 years!
bombcar
City vs metropolitan area confuses many people. A size of a city “feels” like the metropolitan area, but that it often technically many cities up against each other.
kirubakaran
I agree, but that's not the case here though. Just SF the city, not "SF Bay Area", is the 17th largest city in the US! SF feels small, both in area and density.
cwmma
if there is choice (like in my town growing up where there were 5 elementary schools and you could choose to go to any one) there was no guarantee that you'd go to the one you wanted with priority based on various things (distance, popularity etc).

In Boston where there are some VERY good high schools and some meh high schools there is an exam system that may or may not be replaced by something else due to the fact it blatantly favors the wealthier residents.

rcbdev
I am from Austria and yes I am free to send my kid to any public school in the country that will have them. I've even had times in my own childhood where I lived in one state, went to school in another and then switched schools twice within a month because I just didn't like the first one I switched to.

I've never heard that we have significant overcrowding issues or somesuch - if anywhere then probably in Vienna, but that's just general capital city capacity woes.

bombcar
Some US localities allow something similar, and the “school district” may be larger than some countries.

Others are so small and rural that there is only one option, period.

kodt
For your regular public schools yes. However some districts also have more specialized selective enrollment schools you can apply to get accepted to, which may be based on academic performance/testing/demographics.

Sometimes people will use a relative's address to get into a different school/district.

Other than that, charter schools and private schools are also an option of course.

gizmo686
Public schooling in the US is done at a very local level, so varies significantly across the country. Where I grew up, the 1 school in your district was required to accept you. However, some of the nearby districts would let you apply to them, and accept people on a case by case basis. For the most part, this let academically strong students go anywhere; but was also used to let families who move stay at the same school (including siblings who were not yet enrolled).

There are also charter school, which are a weird mix between public and private schools, that typically operate on a mix of applications and lotteries. Plus private schools that can enroll pretty much whoever they want.

aidenn0
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 the grandparent's address is common (since grandparents may own a house in the suburbs while the parents are younger and live in an apartment in a poorer neighborhood).

folkhack
> 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.

---

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.

aidenn0
> Often there's more to it than just perception

Yes, perception has a correlation with reality.

> 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.

Indeed, a friend of mine in elementary school was one example; his grandparents lived down the street from me, and his parents were in a terrible school district.

folkhack
> Yes, perception has a correlation with reality.

Ope.. getting hung up on the statement "perception has a correlation with reality." Reality is the way things are, and perception is quintessentially subjective. It is not guaranteed that perception correlates with reality - just spend 10 minutes with my family for this lesson.

I argue the difference between school districts in the US is not perception, as it is not subjective - it is fact. It is reality. This is something that has been so extensively studied I wish all of us could accept it as fact.

Sorry to get hung up on a word. I find that people making these decisions aren't typically doing it from a subjective place -- they're making data-driven decisions to maximize their child's opportunities.

Sorry to be pedantic... cheers!

[dead] matt3210
[flagged]
rootusrootus
This 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
Do you think folks buying houses don't already look this up? Especially people with children?
ghaff
Of course if it really matters, you should verify. There are weird edge cases where property lines straddle district lines and town boundaries.
gnicholas
Great 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
As 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
I 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
I 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
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.
turtlebits
Not 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.