How Avela Explore Empowers Families To Find the Right School for Their Child
Avela's state of the art school finder solution, Avela Explore, gives school networks and districts a better way to communicate available schools to parents. Explore shows schools on a map and allows parents to search for schools by criteria that's important to them.
But it doesn't stop at school listings; organizations use Explore to help parents understand their educational choices, connect communities with essential services, and visualize key data in a clear, accessible way. Read on to see how Avela customers are leveraging Explore.
A One-Stop Shop for Parents
Avela Explore helps families navigate their school options by bringing all available choices—public, private, and charter—into one seamless experience. Community organizations use Explore to create a unified platform where parents can easily compare schools based on programs, logistics, and fit, rather than being limited by traditional categories. Tucson and the Newark Common App exemplify how this approach empowers families to make the best education decisions for their children.
The filters available in Explore allow for parents find any schools that match the needs of their children. Information such as specialized programs, available grades, and extracurriculars help parents find the school right for them, regardless of what type it may be.
By unifying all available school options in one place, Avela Explore simplifies the decision-making process for parents and guardians, allowing them to easily understand their choices and make the best decision for their family.
Helping Parents Understand Their Options Upfront
Let’s take a closer look at an example: Boston Public Schools use the eligibility feature to power their Explore site. Eligibility gives parents a way to understand what their options are for schools by asking questions before they even begin an application.
Understanding what they're eligible for can help parents make better decisions and ensures that more students are awarded the seats that are right for them.
Explore Benefits More Than Just School Communities
Avela customers use Explore in a variety of ways to benefit their communities, including ways that aren’t related to schools.
For example, Teach for America uses Explore to help people interested in joining their Teacher Corps program to find a location to serve that's right for them. Instead of displaying school information, Teach for America shows useful information about the community, cost of living, and stipend available to those who choose to be placed in those locations. This is shown in the view below.
All of the attributes for each location can be even further refined using the filter option. The “Saved Placement Communities” button (shown above) lets users easily see the locations they’re interested in and have saved along their search.
In a second example, METCO in Boston uses Explore to parents the districts that they can apply to through their programs. District rankings, extracurriculars, awards, accolades, and more are displayed. This extensive breakdown allows parents to filter schools by criteria that matters the most to them and their child.
Providing Necessary Resources Quickly: LA Wildfires
Avela is particularly proud to have adapted Explore to aid in the response to the devastating fires in Los Angeles in early 2025. The Avela team put together an Explore view to help those families affected find aid. Shelters and other resources are displayed on the map below.
The Avela team was able to set up this Explore instance within days. As the situation evolved, the site was able to quickly react to the changing information and making quick updates to the interface. As previously highlighted, the resources available were tagged and had relevant information that allowed them to be easily filtered so visitors could find the resources they desperately needed.
Interested in Explore?
Have an idea about how your organization can use Explore to benefit your community? Please get in touch with Avela here — we’d love to “explore” this idea with you. Our team is ready to collaborate and show you how Explore can transform the way your community accesses and shares critical information. Let’s work together to bring your vision to life!
About Avela
Avela was founded to make enrollment easier, fairer, and more accessible for families and schools alike. Avela offers a complete student application and enrollment solution for education providers, built by a Nobel Prize winning team of practitioners, researchers, and designers. Avela leverages proven research to help families make informed decisions and help schools attract and enroll students seamlessly. Get in touch with us to learn how to boost enrollment, streamline operations, and empower families today.
