data.nysais.org — Site Plan

Purpose

Regional analytics platform combining NYSAIS member school data (from NAIS DASL) with US Census demographics. Aggregate views only — never exposes single-school data.

Audiences

v1 (now): NYSAIS staff only, Google OAuth @nysais.org. Same auth pattern as PL, sponsors, staff-site, DASL Tracker.

v2 (later): Member schools, magic-link auth (same pattern as jobfair.nysais.org). Each school sees their region's aggregate + census data centered on their ZIP.

Core design rule

Never expose single-school data. All school-side aggregates must pass a k-anonymity threshold: minimum 5 schools per rendered cell. Enforced in the query layer, not the UI, so it's a structural guarantee rather than template discipline.

Regions (6, covering all 62 NY counties)

Region	County count	Notes
Western + Central NY	33	Buffalo through Utica/Binghamton belt. Delaware County included (no schools there per user).
Capital District + Lake Placid	13	Capital 4 (Albany, Rensselaer, Saratoga, Schenectady) + Adirondacks incl. Essex/Lake Placid
Hudson Valley	8	Columbia, Greene, Ulster, Dutchess, Sullivan, Orange, Putnam, Rockland
Westchester	1	Own region for now
NYC	5	With borough drilldown where school count ≥ 5 (likely Manhattan + Brooklyn; TBD from DASL)
Long Island	2	Nassau + Suffolk

NYC also drills to NTA-level neighborhoods for the census view (UWS, UES, Village, etc.) using NYC DCP's Neighborhood Tabulation Areas.

Census pipeline (prototype complete)

Standalone Node script fetches ACS 5-year 2022 metrics for a geography and returns population-weighted aggregates. In-tree at server/lib/census/.

Modes:

zip <zip> [radius_mi] — school's ZIP + 5/10/15/25 mi radius
borough <manhattan|bronx|brooklyn|queens|staten_island>
region <region_key>
neighborhood <alias> — friendly NYC neighborhood names (uws, ues, village, ...)
nta <NTACode> — raw NYC NTA (~200 available)

Metrics pulled: population, K-12 age (5-17), households with children, education (bachelor's+), race, Hispanic ethnicity, language spoken at home, owner-occupancy, median household income, median home value.

Disk cache per county + variable set — 20× speedup on warm hits. Whole-NY cache is ~4 MB.

DASL integration (blocked on API access)

DASL API access being pitched to NAIS (see NAIS Proposal). Same pipeline will feed:

DASL Tracker (per-school, staff-only — already shipped)
data.nysais.org (aggregated with n≥5, this site)

One ingest, two consumers.

Currently the DASL Tracker uses manual XLSX upload. API access replaces that step.

Stack

Matches sister apps for consistency:

Node.js 20, Express 5
PostgreSQL 16 (data_db / data_db_user)
Knex migrations
React (Vite) + Zustand — coming in v0.2
Google OAuth (@nysais.org) for staff — coming when auth is wired
PM2 under webapp user
Nginx + Let's Encrypt

Environment

Staging droplet: nysais-staging (this box), port 3005, staging.data.nysais.org
Prod droplet: prod-apps (not deployed yet), will be data.nysais.org when ready

Repo

nysais/data-site on GitHub (to be created when we're ready to push).

Deploy pattern matches sister apps: PR-based dev, tag-and-workflow-dispatch for prod, migrations auto-run in prod deploy script (following pl-site pattern).

Open items

DASL API access (pending NAIS decision)
Google OAuth credentials for this site (need to create in GCP console)
CNAME for staging.data.nysais.org (Andrew handling)
Confirm NYC borough drilldown list (need DASL member counts by borough)