GovTech: “Federal data can be difficult to wrangle, but a new tool created by a nonprofit aims to remove some of the heavy lifting to help create a clear picture of communities socioeconomic needs — specifically within school attendance boundaries. The National Academy Foundation (NAF), an education nonprofit, collaborated with the NYU Marron Institute of Urban Management to develop the Open Data Index for Schools (ODIS), a free, open data resource designed to give insights into the barriers and challenges facing students in historically marginalized school communities. The tool combines data from more than 23,000 public high school communities across the country to communicate barriers at specific school attendance boundaries for public high schools, magnet schools and charter schools. The data comes from 17 different sources, including the Bureau of Labor Statistics, U.S. Census Bureau, County Health Rankings and Roadmaps, City Health Dashboard and Vera Institute. The data is aggregated to school attendance boundaries, the geographic area that students are eligible to attend a designated school. It was created as an alternative database to the National School Lunch Program (NSLP), which reports how many K-12 students are eligible for free or reduced-price meals.”