A school is more than its test scores. The grades it offers can change. A new principal can arrive mid-year. The building can be over capacity, or a parent council can quietly raise hundreds of thousands of dollars for a new playground. Roost field research is the part of a FamilyRoost Roost Rating that captures these operational facts about your catchment school — the things a spreadsheet of scores will never tell you, and that often matter more to day-to-day school life than a half-point difference in a ranking.
It is the only source touched by a human, and it is applied conservatively. Most schools carry no field-research adjustment at all.
What Roost field research is — and isn't
The first three sources of a Roost Rating are different kinds of data:
- PAT (what it is) measures academic results on Alberta's standardized exams.
- Fraser (what it is) is a single-number ranking, included for comparability but weighted lightly.
- AEAM (what it is) is the annual survey of how students, parents, and teachers experience the school.
Roost field research is none of those. It is not a satisfaction score, and it is not academic rigour — those are already covered. It is the operational-events source: a record of concrete, verifiable facts about a school's current situation that the survey and the test scores can't see.
In our own research, broad-web signal turned out to be a poor satisfaction measure — the volume of news coverage tracks how visible a neighbourhood is in local media, not how good its school is. But the same canvass surfaced facts that genuinely change a parent's read of a school. So this source exists to carry those facts forward as structured flags, not as a noisy popularity count.
The five signals we track
Each flag is logged with a plain-language rationale and a source, and applied conservatively on top of the data sources. Here is the full taxonomy and how each one can move a school's score:
| Signal | What it means | Effect on the score |
|---|---|---|
| Grade-configuration change | The school is being shortened or restructured (for example, a K–6 school becoming K–4), so a child enrolling now may be displaced in a few years | Can lower the tier — the most consequential flag |
| Recent incident | A school-internal safety or facility event in the last ~24 months (not a neighbourhood event) | Can slightly lower the score |
| Leadership churn | A new principal in the last 12 months, with another change in the prior 36 | Recorded as a note; does not move the score on its own |
| Capacity pressure | Over-capacity, a recent boundary/redesignation letter, or program migration | Recorded as a note; does not move the score on its own |
| Strong community signal | An active parent council, sustained fundraising, and visible civic engagement | A small upward nudge to the score |
Two principles hold across all five:
- The default is no flag. A school with no logged operational events carries no field-research adjustment. Silence here means "nothing notable," not "missing data."
- Flags are facts, not opinions. Every flag points to something a parent could verify themselves — a CBE notice, a redesignation letter, a council page, a news report.
Why grade-configuration changes matter most
Of the five, a grade-configuration change is the one that can quietly upend a housing decision, which is why it carries the most weight. If a school is being truncated from K–6 to K–4, a family that locks in that catchment address for kindergarten could find their child re-designated to a different school after Grade 4 — exactly the outcome they were trying to avoid. A pure test-score ranking would still show the school as strong; only an operational flag catches the problem.
Illustrative: a school sitting comfortably in a high tier on its academics, then a board notice announces it will be grade-truncated for the upcoming year. The academics haven't changed — but for a family enrolling a four-year-old, the school's future shape has. Roost field research surfaces that, with a link to the notice, so the decision is made with eyes open.
How a flag is logged
Roost field research is human-checked because the signals don't fit a tidy formula — they have to be read, verified, and judged. Every flag follows the same discipline:
- A concrete trigger — a published board notice, a redesignation letter, a council page, a dated news report. No flag is raised on rumour or on a single anonymous review.
- A written rationale — a short note recording why the flag was applied and what it points to, kept alongside the school record. This is what lets us (and, where appropriate, you) trace the adjustment back to its source.
- A conservative effect — most flags are recorded as notes that add context without moving the number. Only a grade-truncation or a recent school-internal incident can lower a tier, and a strong-community signal can only nudge a score upward by a small amount — it can't manufacture a top tier on its own.
We deliberately keep the published view at the level of the flag and its rationale. Sensitive, school-specific field notes stay internal; what you see is the signal, its effect, and its source.
How Roost field research fits the bigger picture
It is the smallest source by design. The heavy lifting in a Roost Rating is done by the survey and achievement data; Roost field research is the conservative human check that sits on top, catching the operational realities those numbers miss. It can lower a score where a concrete problem is documented, or lift it slightly where a community is visibly strong — but it never overrides the data sources.
This is the same thread that runs through all of our methodology. A single ranking number largely tracks a neighbourhood's income, so we contextualize it rather than worship it: four sources instead of one, each shown with its own "last updated" date, each traceable to a source. This is where that philosophy is most visible — it's us doing the legwork a spreadsheet can't, so that a score stays what it should be: a starting point for a conversation with your catchment school, not a verdict on it.
This page explains methodology only. Whether any specific school carries a field-research flag — and the rationale for it — appears on that school's profile, with its own data-freshness date.