When you buy a home, you buy a lot more than a place to live. You buy a neighbourhood, and all that comes with it. For parents, this means the perfect school. From the team behind HoodQ, there is now a solution for homebuyers in search of the home of their dreams in the neighbourhood of their dreams, that also takes into account the school of their dreams.
Introducing the SchoolQ resource, designed to help parents make informed decisions about schools - including specifics on school catchments, testing scores, and honest information about a school's community, strengths and highlights. Available as of today, SchoolQ offers coverage and hyperlocal content for 130 cities across Canada and 2,400 neighbourhoods.
"HoodQ and SchoolQ are the largest providers of curated address and neighbourhood reports in Canada," said Peter Miller, CEO and Co-Founder. "After listening to frustrated moms tell us about the many hours they've spent searching for school and neighbourhood information without feeling like they've found answers, it was clear we needed to create a one-stop source with a focus on schools, neighbourhoods and real estate."
The new SchoolQ website offers Interactive Address Reports , Detailed Reports and Interactive School Reports , which provide insight into schools, school attendance, zones, SchoolQ scores, parks and recreation facilities, safety (including hospitals, police and fire stations), transit and more.
There is nothing to learn or download. Users can create reports for any address (over 10 million in total) instantly - just by typing an address into the search bar.
A School Is More Than A Score
In conjunction with the launch of SchoolQ on August 23rd, the company will also be releasing its first annual National School Report (NSR)*, a free comprehensive cache of digital information with neighbourhood boundary data covering all 15,500 public and private schools nationwide, from 190 Canadian cities in 4,300 neighbourhoods, covering 70% of Canada's population.
That said, "a school is more than a score," adds Co-Founder and CMO Carolyn Keesh. "While standardized testing is consistent and lets educators and parents assess how children and schools are doing compared to the average, it provides an incomplete and sometimes unfairly biased picture of a school. SchoolQ's goal is to add more depth to the consumer research phase. Each school report includes as much publicly available information as can be found so people can get to know the school through their own words, not just through their score."
To support this mission, SchoolQ is inviting each principal / administrator from every school in Canada to take the SchoolQ Challenge and offer feedback about their school, reinforcing the mantra that "A School Is More Than Score."
For more information on SchoolQ and/or the SchoolQ Challenge , please visit www.schoolq.ca.
* SchoolQ scores are modeled per provincial requirements and testing grades and vary per province. The raw assessment data across Canada shown is very similar to what Fraser Institute provides.
