Methodology

How this website is built

NYC School Finder is built on top of a hand-curated, normalized dataset and a separate verification pipeline — not a scrape of the live DOE UI.

1. Source collection

The project uses the DOE School Search backend as the public baseline for official DOE and charter inventory in the supported footprint. Additional metadata comes from DOE pages, NYC Open Data geometry, individual school websites, SUNY Charter Institute filings, and GreatSchools where available.

2. Normalization

The data refresh scripts normalize public, charter, and private school rows into one consistent JSON structure, then generate web-ready assets for the explorer, district pages, school detail pages, and local zoning lookups.

3. Verification

The audit layer currently shows 1,742 covered official public and charter schools out of 1,742 in the supported districts, with 295 private schools carrying stored tuition data.

4. Publishing workflow

The site is published through a structured build flow: refresh the research dataset, regenerate the coverage audit, emit web app JSON, verify, then deploy.

npm run data:publish
npm run verify
npm run build

Current edition published on April 14, 2026.