Every Washington school, at an address of its own -- Olympia to the last district on the map.

A rename does not move it

If a Washington school is renamed the following year, its address is unchanged. The name it was issued under is not the thing the address is computed from once it exists, so the old links keep working and nothing has to be re-sent to families.

A late name collision does not move it either

Two Washington schools can genuinely carry the same name, and the second one can appear years after the first. The school that was already addressed keeps what it has; the newcomer gets a distinct label of its own. Whoever was published first is never displaced.

One state, one root

An address under this root is composed from the school’s own state, so a Washington school can only ever be addressed at washingtonschool.network. A school in another state gets that state’s root instead — there is no fallback root and no guessed one.

39 counties, close to 300 districts, and the count itself drifts

Washington has 39 counties and close to 300 public school districts spread across them -- a number that shifts slightly over time as small districts occasionally consolidate. At that scale, and with that kind of quiet drift built in, "one permanent address per school" is not a formality: it is the only way a school stays namable the same way before and after its own district's boundaries move.

The Washington Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction oversees that whole map, from Olympia out to the last district on it. This root covers the same span: a district anywhere in those 39 counties is addressed under one rule, and a school in the smallest of them is named the same way as a school in the largest.

Seattle, Spokane, Tacoma and Kent -- and the same names recur elsewhere

Seattle Public Schools is the largest district in Washington, alongside Spokane Public Schools, Tacoma Public Schools and Kent School District among the state's other large districts. Across close to 300 districts, the same elementary, middle and high school names turn up again and again in different counties -- the same founders, the same neighborhoods, the same historical names get reused district after district.

That is exactly the collision the "issued once" rule on this page is built for. When a second Washington school turns up years later carrying a name a first school already uses, the school that was addressed first keeps its address unchanged, and the newcomer is given a distinct label of its own. Neither is asked to move.

A Washington charter is its own public school, authorized under a statewide cap

Washington voters authorized charter public schools by statewide initiative in 2012. A Washington charter school is its own independent public school, authorized either by the statewide Washington State Charter School Commission or by an approving local school board -- it is not automatically folded into the district around it, and the total number the state may authorize is capped by statute. Summit Public Schools and Impact Public Schools are real operators running authorized charter campuses in Washington on that footing.

So a charter campus is addressed under this root in its own right, distinct from the nearest conventional district, rather than folded into a district it does not belong to. The address names the school as the state actually organizes it, not as a map might guess it.

Nine Educational Service Districts that support districts, not run them

The Washington Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction groups Washington's school districts into nine regional Educational Service Districts, each covering multiple counties and providing shared services -- special education cooperatives, technology, training -- to the districts inside its region. An ESD helps the districts inside it; it does not govern them, and a school belongs to its district, not to its ESD.

An address here reflects that. It names the school itself. It does not encode an ESD, it does not stand in for the Washington Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction, and it does not imply either one has endorsed or has any hand in the address.

"We already own a domain and OSPI already assigns us a district code"

Every Washington district already runs its own domain, and the Washington Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction already assigns every district its own official state district code. A district technology director is right to ask what a third label adds.

It is not a replacement for either one. Your own domain stays yours to run; your OSPI district code stays the official record. This is a permanent public NAMING host under the Washington state root -- a stable address that does not change when a school is renamed and does not collide when another of Washington's close-to-300 districts turns out to run a school sharing your name. It grants no access, claims no official standing, and sits alongside your domain and your OSPI code rather than standing in for them.