Hi, I’m Mary, the parent behind Homeroom.

Like a lot of Chicago parents, I found the CPS school search and lottery process completely consuming, and a lot more complicated than I expected it to be. When we started looking at kindergarten for my daughter, I toured 12 schools across the city. I built a spreadsheet just to keep everything straight, and I even hosted a moms’ night so a group of us could sit down and compare notes on what we’d each seen.

That’s when it really hit me how much information you need to make this decision well, and how little of it lives anywhere official. It also hit me how lucky I was to be able to gather it at all. I had a flexible enough schedule to take mornings off for tours, a car to get across the city, and a group of friends who were going through the same thing at the same time. A lot of families don’t have that, whether they work hourly shifts, are new to Chicago or to the country, speak a language other than English at home, or are simply doing this on their own.

I didn’t expect schools within three miles of each other to run on completely different clocks. Could our family manage a 7:45am start time in the middle of a Chicago winter? Would a 9am start mean I could make my morning meetings? I didn’t expect aftercare to vary so much either. Some schools staff it with their own team and keep it around $275 a month. Others rely on private or community providers, and families end up paying almost double to cover that cost. CPS is free, but if you work full time and need before or after care, that difference is real money and real logistics for your family.

Then came the questions that don’t show up on any tour or brochure. Is there a nurse in the building every day, and a counselor or social worker kids can go to? What does support look like for a child with an IEP, or for a kid who’s still learning English? How much does the Friends of group or parent organization raise each year, and what does that fund? How many teachers and admins send their own kids to the school? What’s the honest answer on screen time and technology in the classroom? Is dual language right for our family? What’s the parent community like, will we make friends here, and do parents of every background genuinely feel welcomed at the school?

None of that is on the school’s website. Most of it lives scattered across Facebook groups and Reddit threads, if you can even find it, and that means it mostly reaches the families who are already connected. When good information travels through personal networks, the families with the most advantages end up with the most information too, and I don’t think that’s how school choice should work in a public system.

That’s why I built Homeroom.

It’s a free place for the parent community to share what it’s really like at their school, and for families who are touring to take notes, confirm what they’re hearing, and make sense of their options. Homeroom will never rank or score schools, and it isn’t here to glorify or bash any of them. Most CPS schools are truly wonderful places, and the teachers in them are heroes. We start with your neighborhood school, because for most families it’s the school down the block, and it deserves the same care and detail as any program with a waitlist. My hope is that every elementary school in the city ends up with a full, fair picture here, not just the ones whose parents have the most time to post about them.

Schools are a central part of our community. When you choose a school for your child, whether it’s your neighborhood school or a lottery spot, you’re choosing your community from kindergarten through eighth grade. Homeroom is here to help every family choose well, and if you know a school that isn’t well represented yet, I’d love your help filling it in.

Right now, CPS pre-K is in beta on Homeroom, with community early-learning centers coming in spring 2027.