SF School Atlas: A Community-Built High School Admissions Navigator

Happy back to school week. Since some of you are parents of eighth graders, I wanted to let you know about a site we built to help navigate the high school admissions process. The site is called sfschoolatlas.com . After the dust settled on high school admissions, a bunch of us were exhaustedly discussing how the whole thing was so needlessly confusing. It was a good cross-section of parents sending their kids to SFUSD, private, Catholic, and one to a private outside the city. Some of us had a fancy private middle school counselor whose job it was to help us through this process. And some of us were relying on secondhand information and doing it alone. Anyhow, it just felt hard. The one person whose kid just went through the SFUSD lottery straight (no Lowell or SOTA) had the least stressful process (about which she reminded us), but it still wasn't zero stress. So we built the thing we wish we had. Last month, we launched it and sent it to the schools first to make sure we didn't get anything wildly wrong. Feedback is still incoming, but we've gotten enough to know that there's something useful there. The site is mainly three things: A directory of 50 high schools (private, parochial, charter, SFUSD, plus the schools outside the city that get SF kids). We gathered all the data from all the sites so you can see it in one place, make a shortlist, gather the key dates, compare, etc. Also, there are no rankings because they're stupid and we don't know your kid or what's right for them. A collection of guides to the process . Everything we wish we'd known or some kind friend explained to us and was helpful. We're in the middle of writing more of these, so if there are ones you'd like to see, please let us know. Tools . We tried to gather all the tools and rituals that seemed to work for families. A way to have the conversation about what you actually want out of high school, one to keep track of how you're feeling about the schools as you visit, one to compare the schools using your own rubric, and we're finishing one that gathers everything together for essays (not to write a word of them for your student, just to make it a little easier). If you have an eighth grader or know a family that does, we'd love any and all feedback. If you have specific questions about the process, I'm happy to field some here. And if I don't know the answer, I'm sure I can find it or a friendly Redditor will swoop in with help. A few questions I'd have if I was reading this: Is it free? Yes. We'd love to build tools on top of the directory and guides that are valuable enough someone would pay, but the directory and guides themselves are free and staying free. Are you affiliated with a school, institution, or have any bias? No affiliation, but we're sure we have bias. Our core belief is that what's right for one family or student might not be right for another. We hope that guides us away from too much bias. But it's probably still there. Can I trust the data? Each page has both our sources and the date we last confirmed the information was accurate. We've also emailed the schools their pages to check. If (when) an error slips through, please help your fellow parents out by contacting us so we can correct it. Do you have any insight about how to get into ? No. We've talked to some admissions folks, consultants, and that one person at parent gatherings with an older kid who holds court preaching how each school works. In order, they’re: rightfully cagey, motivated to keep their secrets, and entertaining, but we can’t vouch for their advice. If we find a reputable source, we’d love to include it. But given our experiences, we’re not convinced there’s a useful Rosetta Stone.