Most teams start with the AERO public directory of democratic free schools and supplement it with self identified democratic schools that may not appear on the official AERO list. SleekRank reads the combined sheet as a CSV. An AERO membership column controls how each school is labeled in the directory.

A controlled vocabulary lives in a separate tab of the sheet with values like full student vote, mixed student staff vote, consensus circle, and advisory only. Each row picks one value. The normalized model drives per governance hubs, so the column is the source of truth for both the text and hub URLs.

Yes. SleekRank groups by the state column and emits one hub per state at /democratic-schools/state/{slug}/. The hub lists every democratic school in that state, and each school page links back to its state hub and governance hub for consistent internal linking across the directory.

Each row carries unique fields like governance model, voting rights structure, age range, accreditation, and state. The template prints those fields in headings and lead copy, so the rendered HTML differs row by row. Schools without enough content can be filtered out at build time using a quality threshold.

The AERO membership column is a regular field. A school that leaves the AERO network gets re labeled "democratic free school" without the AERO badge on the next refresh. No redirect is needed because the school continues to operate and keeps the same slug across the directory.

Voting rights detail is presented alongside a short explainer of what each governance model means in practice. Schools that prefer softer language can use the description field to explain their governance in their own words alongside the badge, which keeps the directory clear and accurate.

Often yes for non branded queries. A hub at /democratic-schools/governance/full-student-vote/ ships a real HTML list and an entity rich H1, which tends to outrank individual school pages for "full student vote school" style searches because the entity match is tighter and internal linking is denser.

On a typical WordPress install the first build of 80 school pages plus state, governance, and age range hubs takes around 5 minutes. After that, only changed rows refresh, so daily cache rebuilds finish in under 20 seconds even when several rows update during an enrollment cycle peak.