Talk:List of school districts in California

Naming convention
I've proposed a standard form for naming articles on Ohio school districts: Naming conventions (Ohio school districts), which could easily be extended to apply to districts in other states. I'd welcome some feedback on this. PedanticallySpeaking 16:46, 1 February 2006 (UTC)

List source
After spending much time trying to add district names by county, I decided to find a comprehensive list somewhere as there are over 1000 districts in California. I finally used a list from: http://www.greatschools.net/schools/districts/California/CA

There is another list available here: http://www.cde.ca.gov/ds/si/ds/pubschls.asp This is an Excel database which includes all schools and districts. I sorted by district, but this was unwieldy, so I stuck with the list from greatschools.net.

I copied and pasted the entire list (without city and county) to replace what had already been done, double-checking against the original list for variations. I find that greatschools.net added the word "Elementary" to all districts names that are only Elementary districts. Districts, however, seem to go by one or the other, so I am now working through the list going to each individual Elementary district to see what NAME THEY ACTUALLY USE, which is what I will leave on this list. In a few cases the word "City", has also been appended, so I will eventually check every one of them.DavidPickett (talk) 02:30, 20 April 2008 (UTC)

I have reverted a set of changes done yesterday, because they were changed to have the word ELEMENTARY in them, while the official District Names do not include the word "Elementary". County Offices of Education likewise do not include "School District" I have gone to every district website through the letter R and confirmed the district's preferred name as shown by their websiteDavidPickett (talk) 15:25, 27 March 2009 (UTC)
 * AGAIN reverted numerous changes which ADDED words not used by districts in their public names on their public websites; [such as Yreka Union School District at http://www.sisnet.ssku.k12.ca.us/~yesftp/ which DOES NOT use Yreka Union ELEMENTARY School District.] DavidPickett (talk) 15:51, 30 March 2009 (UTC)
 * See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Naming_conventions_(Ohio_school_districts) for more info which includes "School article titles should use the full official name of the school AS PROVIDED BY THE SCHOOL (in this case 'District') itself, unless the most common name for the school is significantly more well known than the official name.DavidPickett (talk) 15:55, 30 March 2009 (UTC)

Merge proposal
I would like to propose that instead of having a separate list of California school districts by county, which is further split up into a multitude of lists for each county (some so short that calling them a "list" is questionable), everything could be consolidated into a dynamically-sortable table on this page. Thus it would serve as an alphabetical list and a by-county list as the reader likes, and there would be only 1 page to maintain instead of n+2 (where n = number of California counties). --LarryGilbert (talk) 17:33, 16 December 2009 (UTC)
 * Agree with making improvements to this list, perhaps setting it up to be sorted by city, county, type of district, and enrollment. The individual county lists shouldn't need much maintenance, unless they are getting vandalized--I don't think that school districts don't get created very often.  The Lists of school districts in California by county shouldn't require any maintenance.  I suspect that some of the people who work on individual counties see the county lists as useful subpages of their County page that eliminate any need for adding such a list to the county page itself.  This list wouldn't serve that purpose.  OTOH, it would be a better list to link to from California and Education in California.  If you want to encourage people to write articles to go with all of the redlinks, it might be good to include links to the state and federal education databases for each district.--Hjal (talk) 07:27, 17 December 2009 (UTC)
 * My only concern would be that someone looking for a particular District may not know which county it is in, but only the name...Would this change allow a district to be searched by name only?DavidPickett (talk) 16:22, 17 December 2009 (UTC)
 * I have merged some of the individual county lists to List of school districts in California by county, since there were too many individual lists with only two or three redlinked items. This keeps the information, and the county sorting, without the multitude of near-empty pages. Gwinva (talk) 04:27, 9 June 2010 (UTC)

Keep structure if merged
if merging information, keep structure so there are multiple ways of searching for info, makes no sense to have only 1 method of looking up info.... keep the county lists, keep the individual lists

also suggest a COUNT variable and DATE updated as well, like: List of school districts in Alameda County, California (X number of schools, last updated DATE/DATE/DATE)

Names again
All Elementary districts do not have the word "Elementary" in their name. The same goes for several other words that editors seem to want to add to this listing. I have checked into each district's website-- "annotated links on edit page, hidden". Even going so far as to check on downloads of PDFs of Board Minutes and the like, to make sure the name that is listed here is the name that is USED by the district.

I find that greatschools.net added the word "Elementary" to all districts names that are only Elementary districts. Districts, however, seem to go by one or the other, so I am now working through the list going to each individual Elementary district to see what NAME THEY ACTUALLY USE, which is what I will leave on this list. In a few cases the word "City", has also been appended, so I will eventually check every one of them.DavidPickett (talk) 02:58, 1 May 2011 (UTC)