Update: VOSD released A Parent’s Guide to Public Schools in February 2018. Click here to view the guide.

Two Perkins Elementary School students take a break from working on a classroom assignment. / Photo by Adriana Heldiz

Parents and students in San Diego Unified School District have until Nov. 13 to apply to schools within the district if they don’t want to necessarily attend the school in their neighborhood.

To help parents navigate their options, we’ve created a map of San Diego County schools, with crucial data about each, along with a quick and easy guide to San Diego Unified’s school choice system.

You can filter the map to show only charter schools. Or only schools with dual-language immersion programs. Or only charters with dual-language immersion programs. Or only schools with the prestigious International Baccalaureate program.

You get it.

The entry for each school will tell you how its students are doing in math and English language arts, along with whether its scores improved over the previous year.

parents guide symbols

We’ve taken the step of converting the states color codes to these symbols.

Some of that data is not yet available for high schools. But for high schools, we have also included how many students did well on the SAT and how many took Advanced Placement tests.

Each school entry also includes the special distinctions the school might have – like whether it is focused on arts or has an AVID program.

The data comes from California Department of Education as of March, and other publicly available sources of demographics, like how many students are eligible for free and reduced lunch in each school,  which is a common measurement of poverty.

This is our first release of a major project to organize and make sense of data available to San Diego parents. In coming months, we’re going to organize it into a Parent’s Guide with several more features helping parents from Oceanside to San Ysidro understand their options and how to make informed decisions.

We put all this together in partnership with Laura Kohn, the director of the Center for Local Income Mobility at the San Diego Workforce Partnership and UC San Diego Extension’s Center for Research on the Regional Economy.

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If you have questions or comments about the guide, email info@voiceofsandiego.org.

Scott Lewis oversees Voice of San Diego’s operations, website and daily functions as Editor in Chief. He also writes about local politics, where he frequently...

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