SchoolMatch

What Parents Want Award

Contact: Dr. Steven M. Sundre
Date: April 1, 2012
614-890-1573

2012 WHAT PARENTS WANT AWARD

Only sixteen percent of the nation's 15,571 public school districts (2,437) have been recognized for meeting the needs of families choosing schools. The nation's largest school selection consulting firm, SchoolMatch® of Columbus, OH, announced the 2012 Twenty-first Annual award in a recent letter to State School Leadership Associations and State Department of Education Superintendents.

SchoolMatch, an independent, nationwide service, helps corporate employee families find schools that match the needs of their children. SchoolMatch® also has conducted more than 1000 Educational Effectiveness Audits of school systems throughout the country and assists corporations with site selection studies.

SchoolMatch® maintains information on every public school system throughout the nation. The service is offered as an employee benefit by about 600 companies, including Office Depot, Ernst & Young, Hewlett Packard, KPMG Peat Marwick, Nationwide Insurance, and Cinergy Corporation.

More than seven million parents accessed SchoolMatch® services through a variety of website locations including national, regional, and local real estate firms, various multiple listing services, chambers of commerce, economic development offices, and other family oriented sites, as well as by personnally contacting SchoolMatch's® Columbus (OH) office. Parents often learn about the service from their corporate human resource office or through impartial media sources such as NBC's "Today Show," USA Today, Business Week, Good Housekeeping, CNN, Money Magazine, The Wall Street Journal, Newsweek, Parents Magazine, Reader's Digest, Offspring Magazine and local news reports.

Criteria used for award selection include:

A close match to what SchoolMatch users most often request. Compilation of over 95,000 parent questionnaires completed by SchoolMatch clients reveals parents most often look for school systems that are:
1. competitive in academic test scores and academically solid, but not so rigorous as to intimidate their children
2. accredited
3. recognized for excellence by a national foundation or by the U.S. Department of Education
4. competitive in teacher salaries
5. above average in instructional expenditures on a national percentile basis
6. above average in expenditures for library/media services on a national percentile basis
7. known for small class size
Availability of programs at the secondary level. Since relocating parents often focus upon finding a school system that produces a certain quality of "end product" (a high school graduate), only school systems that provide secondary school programs are eligible for the award.

An April 1, 2012, search of the twenty-two field SchoolMatch® Database revealed that only 16% of the nation's public schools consistently provide "What Parents Want" in public education. The SchoolMatch® staff of school experts salutes those school districts which are meeting the needs and desires of both students and parents.

Corporations and consumers use SchoolMatch® when moving across town, up-grading residences, relocating to a new area, when negotiating child custody issues and for general information about schools.

School administrators use SchoolMatch® to focus on goals for school system improvement based upon the performance of other "mean matched" schools, a method of comparing their school system with those that have similar characteristics. SchoolMatch® has successfully conducted more than 1000 Educational Effectiveness Audits of school systems throughout the country.

- May 20, 2013