About this site
What this is
This site is an unofficial, plain-language digest of the newsletters that City Schools of Decatur (CSD) sends home with families — the weekly district email and the individual school newsletters. It pulls everything worth knowing into three quick views: a tiered "What's new" front page, an upcoming events list, and a searchable archive of every item ever processed.
Where the information comes from
Newsletters arrive as email in a dedicated mailbox, and each one is hosted on Smore. The pipeline reads those emails, follows the newsletter links, and extracts individual items — announcements, events, deadlines — along with the school or schools they concern.
Every item on this site keeps its receipt: the title and the "original newsletter" link always point back to the exact Smore newsletter the information came from, so you can verify anything in one click. Items that appear in several newsletters say so ("seen in 2 newsletters") and keep a link to the first one that carried them.
How the front page is ranked
Importance changes placement — it never hides anything. The front page has three sections, and all three are always shown:
- Across CSD — district-wide news: items that appeared in the CSD Weekly hub or across multiple school newsletters.
- Your schools — items from the schools this family follows, as configured in the importance settings.
- Other schools — everything else, in a compact list at the bottom so nothing goes missing.
Within each section, items are sorted with the newest newsletter first. A small set of must-see items can also be pinned to the top of their section.
How dates work
Every date used to order and group items comes from the newsletter itself — the date in its subject line or on its page (for example, "CSD Weekly - March 5, 2026"). Dates are not taken from when the email arrived in the mailbox: a batch of older newsletters was backfilled early in the project, and those arrived out of order, so arrival dates cannot be trusted for chronology. If an item was announced in the March 5 newsletter but that email landed on February 19, the item correctly appears under March 5.
The events page lists items that carry an event date within the next 60 days, sorted by date and grouped by month. The archive can be filtered by year using the newsletter dates.
Search and privacy
Search and filters on the archive page run entirely in your browser, using a small index that is generated with the rest of the site. Nothing you type is sent to a server. The site uses no cookies, no analytics, no advertising, and no third-party scripts or fonts — the only files it loads are its own pages and stylesheets.
How it is kept current
The site is rebuilt automatically from the archive after each newsletter run. When a newsletter adds or updates an item, the change shows up here the next time the pipeline runs; older newsletters are never edited, so the archive is an accurate record of what was actually announced, and when.