Which schools we include

Our intention is to include any high school a family living in San Francisco could reasonably choose. We lean toward including a school rather than leaving it out. But a school that isn't a real option for a San Francisco family makes the ones that are harder to find.

We count a school as a high school if it enrolls any of grades nine through twelve, and from there it comes down to two questions.

San Francisco's public schools are open to any student living in San Francisco. We don't include another district's public schools, because enrolling there means living outside San Francisco. We also leave out schools a family can't directly apply to, like the few that enroll students only when a district places them there, rather than when a family asks.

Independent, private, and parochial schools take applications from anywhere. Where a family lives isn't a consideration, so the answer is yes.

Charter schools are the harder case, and we include only San Francisco's. A charter can't turn a family away for living outside its district, but state law requires it to give preference to families who live inside it. A charter that isn't oversubscribed would take a San Francisco student, but which schools those are changes from year to year. The rest run a lottery, and that's where the preference decides: a San Francisco family sits behind every local one, and behind whatever further preferences the school stacks on top. We treat that as a rule about where a family lives, the same as a district line.

A school can be open to a family and still sit somewhere no student could reasonably go every day. For any school in San Francisco itself, the answer is yes. For schools outside the city, any one of these is enough:

• A student can get to school by 8:30am on public transit, in under 75 minutes.
• A student can get to school by 8:30am by car, in under an hour.
• The school runs a bus into San Francisco.

Two things would make this question disappear, and we don't count either. Boarding turns a school anywhere into one a student could attend, and a fully remote school has no commute at all. Counting them would mean listing every boarding and online school there is. Some schools in the directory offer boarding, and none of them are here because of it.

We measure every trip from the middle of San Francisco, timed to arrive by 8:30am. California law requires public and charter high schools to start no earlier than that. Private schools set their own start times, and we use 8:30am for every school to keep the comparison simple. A real trip runs shorter or longer depending on the starting neighborhood.

For driving, we use Mapbox to determine how long the trip takes on a weekday morning, with traffic.

For transit, we use the published weekday timetables from 511, the Bay Area's transit data service. The 75 minutes is the whole trip, so we take the scheduled ride and add the time to reach the station in San Francisco and the walk or shuttle at the other end.

The thresholds are deliberately generous. They exist to rule out schools nobody could attend, not to tell a family what counts as too far. Fifty minutes each way is impossible for one family and unremarkable for another, and plenty of parenting adults are already driving out of the city every morning and can drop a student off on the way.