I read 28 school websites so you don't have to

Last week I posted about wanting some sanity around parent–school communication. A lot of you replied "same." So I spent a week actually checking — mostly to make sure I wasn't about to ask the district for something they already do.

The short version

3 / 28schools where I could confirm how to report an absence

2 / 28schools publishing a bell schedule that says when early dismissal actually ends (both are high schools)

13 / 28schools with a parent handbook I could find at all

8 / 28schools whose weekly newsletter I could track down

And a few specifics, because those land better than vibes:

7 schoolshave a PTA page showing a raw placeholder where the content should be.

March 2021is where one school's PTA minutes stop. I'm sure they were excellent minutes.

"21-22"is still in another school's PTA link — which tells you when anyone last touched it.

To be clear: nobody did anything wrong here. Every school made sensible choices with the tools they had. Nobody coordinated those choices — so the same fact, like what time early dismissal ends or who to email when your kid's sick, lives somewhere different, in a different format, at all 28 of them.

There are really three kinds of information

How your school works

Bell schedule, lunch, absences, buses, aftercare, who to call. Same for every family, barely changes.

schoolz does this

What's happening & what's due

Half days, picture day, form deadlines, fundraisers. Changes weekly — this is where "wait, that was today?" lives, and it was far and away the most common complaint I heard.

schoolz does this

Your own kid's world

Teacher messages, assignments, grades. ClassDojo, Remind, Genesis, Google Classroom. Personal, sensitive, and a genuinely different problem.

deliberately not touching

The first two are public information that should look the same at every school. That's the fixable part. That's what I built.

So I built a thing

It's called schoolz (working title — I'm very open to better). It puts buckets 1 and 2 in one place, per school. No account, no ads, no cost, nothing about your child.

Try it

Cherry Hill East, Bret Harte, Woodcrest, and Chesterbrook Academy Preschool have the most filled in — start with one of those to see what your school could look like.

Three things I need from you

Send me your school's newsletter. This is the big one — it's what makes your school's page fill in. Paste the link here.
Take the survey. Two minutes, and it's the evidence I can actually hand the district. Start here.
Tell me what's wrong. Wrong phone number, stale date, missing school — I want to know.

How to find your school's newsletter link

It arrives as an email (usually from an app called Smore). At the very top there's a line like "Not displaying correctly? View in browser." That link is the whole thing I need. Drop it here →

The fine print, since someone will ask

I'm not selling anything. No company, no ads, no fees, no catch.
It touches nothing about your kid — no grades, no names, no student data. Only information already published publicly on school and district websites.
It's open source, so anyone can read exactly what it does and where every fact came from.
The goal is to hand all of this — findings and tool — to the district, and to have something useful in the meantime.

Want the whole thing?

For the genuinely curious, here's everything, unabridged:

The full write-up for the district — findings school by school, and what I'm asking them for.
The gory data detail — exactly what's covered, what isn't, and where it broke.

This is a lot of words for "please send me your school's newsletter link." Here's that link again.