School Safety NYC

Inspiration

I was born in NYC and lived there until I was 7. I knew what it was like going to school there. I also know that NYC has a high crime rate relative to other cities. I made this website in hopes of showing people some essential historical information about the safety of their schools. Were their crimes committed there? How many? I answer these questions with School Safety NYC.

What it does

Provides a map and data table that depicts numbers and categories of crimes committed near/at the school over the past several years. Also contains resources for parents and staff that allow them to report school safety concerns and improve school safety in NYC schools respectively.

How we built it

HTML, CSS, Vanilla JS, Leaflet, NYC Open Data datasets.

Challenges we ran into

This was one of my first times working with Leaflet! I wasn't very familiar with tile layers, adding circles/markers, popups, and just the overall groove of creating maps. It was a tough process for me to map points indicating school locations from the NYC Open Data school crimes API to Leaflet as well as attaching information to those map points, as I'm not great at JS nor do I have much experience using APIs and Leaflet. The development process was a LOT of debugging, reading documentation, Stack Overflow, learning about APIs, and browsing through data. It was a great opportunity at challenging myself.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

Incredibly proud of creating a functional, working site but even more proud of having been able to navigate APIs and Leaflet this well considering I'm so new to this side of programming.

What I learned

Simplicity is best. My website doesn't have an extensive functionality - it serves one purpose, and that is to convey information that indicates very important information to people about the safety of their schools or their children's schools.

What's next for School Safety NYC

To provide more information (in terms of quantity of information as well as specificity of info) regarding school safety, and to add another 500-1000 schools to the map.