Aligning Navigate STL Schools Data Priorities: Learning from Parent Focus Groups
By: MISTI JEFFERS, Ph.D. AND claire Heggie
St. Louis City is an area where parents have access to many school options. Within this choice-rich context, understanding how parents sort and make decisions about school options and providing parents with transparent, quality information about schools is vital. One organization born out of the recognized need for more accessible information about schools in St. Louis City is Navigate STL Schools—a non-profit organization “that helps families learn about the local school system and the school options available to them.” Navigate STL Schools recognizes the school enrollment process is complex and aims to give every family the tools to simplify the process, regardless of race, economic status, or academic ability.
Based on this mission, Navigate STL Schools developed an online platform to aid families in gathering information about schools in St. Louis City. This platform allows families to search for schools by location and grade level. From there, Navigate STL Schools provides data about school type, academic performance, extracurriculars, safety, discipline, and more. Additionally, the Navigate STL Schools website allows for comparison against average state and city-wide performance for each school. To ensure accuracy, Navigate STL Schools obtains all data from the Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education and aggregates it to an easily accessible format.
The PRiME Center partnered with Navigate STL Schools to determine data priorities that align with parent needs. To meet this objective, we sat down with 28 parents in a series of focus groups to learn more about how parents make informed school decisions. The focus groups produced information around four guiding questions:
What challenges did parents face while navigating school enrollment decisions?
How did parents access information to help them make school choices?
What information about schools did parents find most valuable in determining what makes a school a “good fit” for their children?
How did parents respond to features of the Navigate STL Schools website?
PRiME delivered a 28 page report to Navigate STL School summarizing the lessons learned from those conversations and a set of actionable recommendations based on these findings. To learn more about this project, please refer to the Aligning Navigate STL Schools Data Priorities: Learning from Parent Focus Groups Executive Summary.