Improving the Enrollment Experience for Families

Our MIMS Capstone Project focuses on the school enrollment process of public schools in the San Francisco Bay Area. The aim is to make the enrollment process more understandable for the parents who send their kids to public schools in the SF Bay Area. The project will be in collaboration with the San Francisco Unified School District (SFUSD).

As per the current system, the parents (or the students themselves) can apply to as many schools as they would like. Their school preference list is fed into a Student Assignment System (SAS),  which is based on an algorithm that takes the preferences of all applicants and the number of available seats at each school, and assigns them to schools. The system has a complex algorithm built with a vision to improve ethnic diversity in public schools. However, an adverse consequence of this system is that some parents feel confused with the assignment process, and may be unhappy if they do not get the school of their choice. This may lead to them leaving the school district.

Our project aims to focus on the following goals:

• Understand the challenges parents face while navigating through the process of applying to public schools
• To provide a information framework that makes it makes the process more comprehensible for parents/families
• Provide this information framework via tangible experience - web component or physical prototype