All educational organizations and institutions have policies and procedures, and these need to be organized, categorized, and numbered. When doing so, it is a best practice to look for appropriate standards to follow.  For California Charter Schools, following a system similar to their authorizing school district, helps to reduce some of the apprehension that school districts have at times when working with charter schools.

In California, the majority of school districts use the Gamut Online Database from the California School Boards Association (CSBA) to store and disseminate their board policies.  As these are all public records, I set out to determine what common policies existed in California School Districts, what they were named, and how they were numbered.  To do this, I developed a web scraper (software the automatically downloads web pages) to go through every school district in GAMUT and download the list of board policies and policy numbers for each district.  These I stored in an Excel Spreadsheet of California Public School District Policies from GAMUT, and then analyzed this data using pivot tables and basic statistical methods to determine commonalities between districts to produce a recommended California Charter School Policy Numbering:

Note: Most charter schools use a different numbering system for their Board Bylaws, and it is not necessarily recommended to change this, since a charter school’s board bylaws are sufficiently different in content than that of a school board.