“Which school serves this address?” Answered on your own website.
A “Find your school” lookup for your website. Families type an address and see the assigned elementary, middle and high school. You can lock it to your district and give it your name, logo and colors.
The problem it solves
Every enrollment season brings the same question, and the answer depends on a map most families never see.
Families call to ask
Parents moving in, buying a home or registering a kindergartner want to know which school serves their address. Often the only way to find out is to call or email the district office.
Boundaries change
New schools open, neighborhoods grow and attendance areas get redrawn. A PDF map on the website goes out of date, and families can’t easily tell which side of a line a house is on.
Not every district has GIS staff
Building and hosting an address lookup takes mapping skills and upkeep. Many smaller districts don’t have someone whose job that is.
Build your finder
Choose your district and options, check the preview, then copy the code into your website. The preview is the real widget.
Open the full setup page Searchable district list, map on or off, a direct link, a “Find my school” button and a printable QR-code flyer.
Paste the code where the finder should appear (WordPress “Custom HTML” block, Squarespace “Code” block, or any HTML page). It resizes itself and works on phones. Step-by-step help
Pricing
The finder is free with a small credit. A license removes the credit and adds your branding.
Free
- Lookup locked to your district
- Choose the school levels shown
- English and Spanish
- Your enrollment page and “Questions?” line
- Default colors and a small “Powered by Washington School Map” credit
District plans include boundary updates: send us your current boundary file and we keep your lookup current. How it works
Requests open a short form here on the site; we reply with details.
About the boundary data
District-confirmed boundaries
Districts with current boundaries: loading…
Send us your current boundary file — we keep your lookup current. With a district plan, we load your official attendance areas (a shapefile, GeoJSON, KML or a link to your GIS map service) into your finder, the statewide map and every school report. Each answer then says “Boundary: confirmed by” your district and the school year, and we load the new file whenever you redraw.
We also load boundaries that districts and counties already publish as open GIS data. We never redraw boundaries ourselves or guess which school a polygon belongs to.
Everywhere else — attendance areas: 2015–16 NCES School Attendance Boundary Survey. The National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) collected district boundaries in that survey, and it is the most recent statewide set available to us. It was an experimental survey, and 2015–16 is the most recent year NCES lists. About the NCES survey ↗
Districts may have redrawn boundaries or opened schools since then, so some answers may be out of date. The widget says so under every answer, and the district should confirm the current boundaries before families rely on them.
School names, locations, enrollment and test results are refreshed monthly from OSPI and NCES. Only the attendance areas are old.
Opens a short form here on the site. Don’t attach files; tell us where we can get them, and we’ll follow up.
Questions
What happens when someone types an address outside our district?
They get a polite message that the address is outside your district, with a link to the statewide map. No schools from other districts are shown.
Where do the addresses go?
The address goes to the U.S. Census Bureau geocoder (and OpenStreetMap as a backup) to find its location. Finding the schools then happens in the visitor’s browser. We don’t store addresses or sell any data.
Can we use our own, current boundaries?
Not automatically yet. Send us what you have with the button above and we’ll tell you whether and when we can use it.
Does it work on our website builder?
It is a standard iframe, so it works on most website builders that allow embed codes. Some builders set the height by hand; see the step-by-step help.
What if our license ends?
The finder keeps working as the free version, with default colors and the credit.