How We Collect and Verify Calendar Data

Where the data comes from

Every event in an AutoCal feed traces back to a public, official source. We do not crowdsource dates or copy them from third-party listing sites. Our sources, in order of preference:

• Official district websites. Most US districts publish their calendars through a school CMS platform such as Finalsite, Apptegy, or Edlio. We identify which platform a district uses and read the calendar data that district has published there.
• Published ICS feeds. Where a district exposes a standard iCalendar feed, we subscribe to it directly. This is the cleanest source because it reflects the district's own calendar system without any interpretation on our side.
• State Department of Education calendars. Several states publish official district-by-district academic calendars (for example composite calendar PDFs or statewide calendar pages). We ingest these as an authoritative source, especially for districts whose own sites are hard to parse.
• NCES Common Core of Data (CCD). Directory information about districts and schools -- names, locations, grade spans, enrollment -- comes from the National Center for Education Statistics. We use it to organize the catalog and enrich district pages, not as a source of calendar dates.

How extraction works

We maintain a dedicated parser for each major calendar platform, because each one structures its data differently. A Finalsite parser discovers a district's iCal feed even when the site runs on a custom domain; an Apptegy parser reads the platform's public events API and matches organizations to districts by their official website domain; an Edlio parser handles that platform's calendar format. State DOE documents go through their own ingestion scripts.

Extracted events are validated before they reach a feed. We check that dates fall within a plausible academic-year window, that start dates precede end dates, that titles are meaningful, and that duplicates from repeated parses are removed. Events that fail validation are dropped rather than published.

How we keep feeds fresh

Calendar data goes stale quickly -- districts move PA days, add make-up days, and publish next year's calendar mid-summer. Three automated systems run on a schedule to keep up:

• Daily sync. A nightly job re-checks district sources and pulls updated events into feeds, so a change a district publishes typically appears in your calendar within a day.
• Freshness gate. A daily audit classifies every district feed as fresh, stale, or unknown based on whether it contains events for the current academic year. Stale feeds are flagged and queued for re-extraction instead of being silently served with outdated dates.
• Event cleanup. A quality pass removes events that are too old, implausibly far in the future, duplicated, or malformed, so feeds stay clean over time.

Coverage

The pipeline covers thousands of school districts across all 50 states, and coverage grows as we add parsers for more platforms and ingest more state DOE sources. Not every district publishes machine-readable calendar data, so some feeds carry directory information while calendar extraction is still in progress -- the freshness gate keeps those clearly separated from feeds with verified current-year events.

Corrections

If you spot a wrong date, a missing event, or a feed that looks out of date, email us at hello@autocaldata.com. We review every report, re-check the official source, and fix the feed. Reports from parents and district staff regularly help us catch platform changes before our automated checks do.