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 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 rarely. It can only lower a score, never raise it: by 5 points on a 0 to 100 scale for an announced grade-configuration change, or 3 for a recent school-internal incident. As of October 2026, none of the 471 rated schools on FamilyRoost carries a field-research adjustment, and four carry a note. If your school's profile shows no field-research note, that is the ordinary case, not a gap.
What Roost field research is, and what it isn't
Two sources decide the bulk of a Roost Rating, and they measure different kinds of thing:
- PAT (what it is) is how the school's Grade 6 students did on Alberta's provincial exams. It decides 37.5% of a grade when a school has both sources.
- AEAM (what it is) is the annual survey of how students, parents and teachers experience the school. It decides the other 62.5%.
(The Fraser Institute's /10 is shown on school profiles for comparability across boards, but it is not counted in the rating. Why.)
Roost field research is neither of those. It is not a satisfaction score and it is not academic rigour, because those are already covered. It is the operational-events source: concrete, verifiable facts about a school's current situation that a survey and a set of exam results cannot 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 board has announced the school will be shortened or restructured (for example, a K–6 school becoming K–4), so a child enrolling now may be displaced in a few years | Lowers the score by 5 points until the change starts, the most consequential flag. After that it stays as a note |
| Recent incident | A school-internal safety or facility event in the last ~24 months (not a neighbourhood event) | Lowers the score by 3 points |
| 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, each with dated evidence from the last 24 months | Recorded as a note; does not move 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.
The flag counts while the change is pending. It lowers the score from the day the board announces the change until the first day of the new configuration. Once the change has started, the school simply is a K–4 school: its profile shows the new grade span, and the flag stays as a note. The score goes back to what the data says, because a school that was built as K–4 carries no penalty, and two schools with the same grades shouldn't be scored differently because one of them changed recently.
Why a strong community is a note, not a score
Until October 2026, a strong-community flag added 5 points. When we re-checked it against the written standard (council activity, fundraising and outside coverage, all dated within the last 24 months), none of the 26 schools we re-researched met it. What actually separated schools was how much their parent council publishes online: dated minutes, fundraising totals, press mentions. That follows a neighbourhood's spare time and money more than the strength of its community, which is the same trap as the broad-web signal above. So it now appears on a profile as a note, only where we could verify recent, dated evidence, and it never changes the score.
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 pending grade-configuration change or a recent school-internal incident can lower a score, and nothing in field research can raise one.
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 change or problem is documented, it never raises one, and 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 read it in context: two scored sources instead of one, each shown with its own "last updated" date and each traceable back to where it came from, plus this human check on top and the Fraser number displayed beside them without being counted. This page is where that shows most plainly, because it is the legwork a spreadsheet cannot do.
This page explains methodology only. Whether any specific school carries a field-research flag, and the rationale for it, appear on that school's profile with its own data-freshness date.