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sunlightlabs / sitegeist

Understand and uncover the identity of your location with a tap.
http://sitegeist.sunlightfoundation.com
BSD 3-Clause "New" or "Revised" License
39 stars 13 forks source link

Idea: look into adding school data #8

Open nickom opened 10 years ago

nickom commented 10 years ago

A user was disappointed to see the app includes no information about nearby schools.

Perhaps reach out to greatschools.org and ask about using their API for free? They look to have some good info: http://www.greatschools.org/api/registration.page

Looks like the ACS from the census has some information (obviously about demographics not the schools themselves): SCHOOL ENROLLMENT EDUCATIONAL ATTAINMENT

I wonder if there are other sources for information about nearby schools, such as raw counts of how many schools exists at each level (elementary schools, high schools, colleges, etc) in a given region.

nickom commented 10 years ago

Thanks to some research with @timball - we turned up this possibly useful dataset: http://nces.ed.gov/ccd/pubschuniv.asp

nickom commented 10 years ago

It's a ZIP file with coverage of all states that has public elementary and secondary school with "basic information and descriptive statistics on all schools, their students, and their teachers."

Sounds pretty perfect for our needs, @jcarbaugh can you take a peek when you get a moment? Sadly we couldn't find an API, just some fat ZIPs