Waukesha Parent Builds Color-Coded Spreadsheet To Fix District's Second School Assignment Mix-Up In Nine Days

WAUKESHA — Rita Feldman, 48, of Whitestone Avenue, has spent the better part of this week doing, by hand and on her own time, what the Waukesha School District has so far described only in a single press release as a "database synchronization issue." Working from her dining room table with a laptop, a printed copy of the district's official school directory, and a Nextdoor account she opened seven years ago mainly to post about a missing cat, Feldman built a color-coded spreadsheet sorting 237 families' school assignment emails into three categories: correct, wrong, and needs verification.

The district sent building assignment emails to families districtwide the evening of August 6, three weeks before the start of the 2026-27 school year. By the morning of August 7, Feldman said, her own family's email listing her daughter's school did not match the building code Feldman remembered from an enrollment postcard mailed in June. She said she checked the district's public online directory, found a discrepancy, and posted a question to her neighborhood's Nextdoor group asking if anyone else's assignment "looked off."

"I got forty-one replies in about two hours," Feldman said. "That's when I realized this wasn't just us."

Green, Yellow, Red

Feldman said she spent roughly six hours over two evenings building a spreadsheet with three color categories: green for assignments she confirmed matched the district's own directory, yellow for assignments she could not yet verify, and red for assignments she determined were wrong. Of the 237 households that submitted their assignment emails to her by August 8, Feldman's spreadsheet marked 164 green, 41 yellow, and 32 red. She said she cross-referenced the full list against the official directory three separate times before posting any corrections, a step she called "non-negotiable."

"I am not a database administrator. I am a parent with a spreadsheet and a Tuesday off," Feldman said. "But I checked it three times, because if I'm wrong about somebody's kid's school, that's on me, not the district."

"I am not a database administrator. I am a parent with a spreadsheet and a Tuesday off."

— Rita Feldman, 48, Whitestone Avenue

Feldman began posting corrected assignments to Nextdoor on the evening of August 8, tagging affected families by street when she could and asking others to comment their addresses so she could look them up individually. She has not sought, and does not have, any authorization from the district to distribute the corrections, and has not been paid or reimbursed for her time.

District Cites 'Database Synchronization Issue'

The district's sole public statement on the matter, issued the afternoon of August 7, attributed the errors to "a database synchronization issue affecting a subset of building assignment records" and said the matter was "under active review." It did not include an estimated timeline for corrected notices or a count of affected families. District IT Director Marcus Chen, who led the response to a separate enrollment mapping error that affected 347 students in late July, said this week's issue was unrelated to that one and declined to comment further on the current investigation's progress.

Feldman said she has not heard from the district directly, though she said a neighbor who works in the district's central office "unofficially" confirmed her spreadsheet's Whitestone Avenue corrections matched internal records. "I'd love for someone from the district to just email me the real list," Feldman said. "I would gladly retire this spreadsheet tomorrow. Until then, 237 families needed to know if their kid's showing up at the right building on the first day, so here we are."

Neighbor Denise Okafor, 39, whose family's assignment was flagged yellow before Feldman confirmed it green on her second pass, said she has come to treat Feldman's spreadsheet as more reliable than the district's own emails. "Rita double-checks things. The district apparently does not," Okafor said. "I told her she should charge for this. She said absolutely not, she just wants people to stop texting her."

Feldman said she plans to keep updating the spreadsheet through the start of the school year and will retire the yellow category "the moment the district publishes literally anything with numbers in it." She said she has not counted how many hours she has now put into the project total, "because I don't think I want to know."