School Game Plan

About the Project

“School Game Plan” is a series of guides that helps parents and caregivers understand their choices in the Los Angeles Unified school system, the nation’s second-largest.

Navigating L.A. schools can be fraught, confusing, and high stakes. We know this because as the school choice cycle opens up each year, we hear from community members and colleagues alike asking for resources to find a “good” school.

In late 2023, we began research to explore how deep the anxiety went. Using community surveys, focus groups, and in-depth one-on-one interviews, we saw trends emerge. Families told us choosing a school in the Los Angeles area feels “difficult,” “very hard,” “bewildering,” “overwhelming,” and “anxiety driven,” and that they get lost in a deluge of jargon and information. Low-income families and parents who don’t speak English as their first language face additional disadvantages.

Parallel to this family engagement, we examined if other efforts to unpack the process existed, what we could do differently and how we could make information that often only passes through the “parent whisper network” more accessible.

Our goals for this initiative:

• Build community engagement into our research, development and promotion.
• Help families navigate enrollment options and give them tools to participate in their child’s education afterward, too.
• Unpack the emotions of those processes.
• Plot a multiplatform approach for radio, digital, on-demand audio, newsletters, print and live events to reach families where they are.
• Democratize school knowledge to make essential information broadly available outside privileged parent networks.

We invited a select group of parents to join our process as part of a community review committee, to help ensure accuracy, accessibility, and usefulness. We gave them a small stipend for participation.

This legwork culminated in the April 2025 launch of a comprehensive guide to choosing a school, filled with actionable advice from real parents and breaking down confusing terms and processes. We published subsequent guides with specific focus areas (for example, a guide to the state’s public preschool options), and followed a similar multiplatform strategy for each. We also re-purposed and updated our newsroom’s work from prior years that fell into the bucket of helping families navigate the public school system. Our guides are also available in Spanish, including the print edition of our main school choice guide.

We continue to add to and update this work, and solicit parent input to make it continually relevant.