St. Louis School Finder Explained On Show Me St. Louis

Parent meeting with a school navigator after using the St. Louis school finder.

Navigate STL Schools is a new non-profit organization dedicated to providing equitable access to data and enrollment information to parents and community organizations or leaders for schools within the St. Louis City area. Our St. Louis school finder tool might be daunting, so we explain it in this interview with Show Me St. Louis.

The website is designed to be mobile-friendly and provides important information for parents and caregivers about the schools in their area. You can search using many different criteria like test scores, second language options, after school activities, classroom sizes, teacher experience levels & more.

Parents can get involved by calling (314) 408-2468 or emailing Navigate STL Schools to set up an appointment with a School Navigator to walk through the tool’s capabilities and help them choose the right school for their child(ren). Community organizations like churches or parent groups can also call to invite Navigate STL Schools to their next event to introduce the tool and help parents to make educated decisions about their child’s schooling.

Video Explaining The Importance Of The St. Louis School Finder Tool

Here is a video from a local St. Louis news program called Show Me St. Louis. This is a great interview that explains how our website works and why it’s important for your child’s education. After watching this video you will have a better understanding of our website and how to use it to improve your school search. Below the video, you will find the full transcript of the video for anyone that has trouble with hearing.

YouTube video

The Full Video Transcript Is Located Below:

Speaker 1:
Finding the right school for your child to thrive can take a lot of work, but luckily for parents, there’s a website that does all that work for St. Louis city families.

Speaker 2:
It’s called Navigate STL Schools, and it has all the info and resources families need in one place.

Speaker 1:
Welcome to Show Me St. Louis.

Speaker 3:
Oh, thank you for having me today.

Speaker 1:
Tell us, what is Navigate STL Schools?

Speaker 3:
Navigate STL schools is a new nonprofit organization that is built on the foundation of providing equitable access to data and enrollment information for schools within the St. Louis city area.

Speaker 1:
Talk about the website. What kind of information is on the website?

Speaker 3:
The website is actually really, really cool. It’s designed to be used on mobile devices. And so there isn’t a lot of optimization that really needs to happen. It’s not like an app. And when you go into the website, you can see every school within the city of St. Louis that reports to the Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education, and you can go into these profiles and look at their test scores, what after-school options they have, what their academic focus is, how long teachers have been there.

Speaker 3:
You can either break it down by demographic of race and age, and it’s a really useful tool when you are starting to think about how parents are just getting more involved in their education, or in their child’s education, and they might have so many questions about what’s actually happening in the buildings. We’re putting everything right there in one place for families.

Speaker 1:
Why is this website important for the community?

Speaker 3:
It’s really important, I think right now especially, because with the whole pandemic, parents are starting to get more involved, in-depth, and kind of seeing what’s happening in the school system and really trying to find a place that is going to meet their child’s unique needs.

Speaker 3:
When we’ve talked to parents over the last couple of months, there’s been this idea that it’s so hard to find the information that you need, and that’s just from this last couple of months. It’s been years of parents just saying, “Well, I don’t know who I need to call. When do the applications open? What are they teaching in the building? Do they have AP classes? Are they doing second language for elementary?” And you just can’t find that information anywhere. And so we really wanted to take this as an opportunity to put that information right in the hands of parents and families so that they can start to redefine quality education for themselves.

Speaker 1:
How can people get involved with Navigate STL Schools?

Speaker 3:
That is a great question. Beyond the website, we provide individualized services to families. You can call or email us to schedule an appointment with a navigator. You can post an event for your church, your friend group, your sorority/fraternity organizations, where there’s like-minded parents who just want to kind of get down to it and understand this information together, or you can simply just kind of visit the website for yourself and perform a search. But I think that it’s really important for people to kind of try to sit down with someone first and talk it through because there are a lot of numbers there and it’s just like, okay, so what does this really mean for me and for my kid? And really having someone to help walk you through that process is going to be crucial, especially in these first couple of years of understanding the data so that people can use it to apply it to their daily lives.

Thank You For Learning About Navigate STL Schools

We want to thank you for taking the time to learn about our school finder tool for St. Louis area schools. If you still have any questions about how our tool works or why it’s important to you and your children, please feel free to call us at (314) 408-2468 or email us at Navigate STL Schools. We are here to help you and serve the St. Louis, Missouri community so your child has a bright future and a great education. Our goal is for you to find the right school for your child.