arik Savage

National Association of State Boards of Education (NASBE)

Screenshot of the home page of https://statepolicies.nasbe.org taken on December 15th 2024. Overview of the School Health Policy Database, including a map of categorized states based on their policies. Screenshot of the By Categories page of https://statepolicies.nasbe.org taken on December 15th 2024. A listing of policy categories, and their sub-categories. Screenshot of the Chronic Conditions Category page of https://statepolicies.nasbe.org taken on December 15th 2024. Lists states by whether or not they have relevant policies. Screenshot of the By State page of https://statepolicies.nasbe.org taken on December 15th 2024. A listing of US states and categories, with a number indicating how many policies in each. Screenshot of the Illinois page of https://statepolicies.nasbe.org taken on December 15th 2024. Lists all categories and sub-categories of policies in Illinois. Screenshot of the Illinois - Chronic Conditions Category page of https://statepolicies.nasbe.org taken on December 15th 2024. Displays a detailed list of policies for the category and state.

The NASBE State Policy Database was a data-architecture puzzle, and I loved it. It cross-referenced more than 18,000 state education and health laws, statutes and regulations across 201 categories and 53 states and territories. Thanks to Drupal taxonomies, relationships and contextual filters, the site only needed three kinds of page: state, category, and state × category. Nobody had to build 10,000+ combinations by hand.

Sunset by NASBE in January 2025 after four years in service. Screenshots taken December 2024.

Getting the data in

Once the content model was nailed down, I built a custom Feeds import to load the client’s CSVs, up to 18,000 rows at a time. Every row got parsed and matched to its policy, category and state.

Then the relationships took over, and it was honestly a little magical. A state’s page lists every category where it has at least one policy, with counts. A state × category page shows those policies, plus related content: other categories for that state, and other states tackling the same category. Category pages work the other way around, listing every state with policies on that topic.

That made life easier for everyone. Visitors can browse by state, by category or just search, starting from a clickable state map on the homepage (built by the Sandstorm team) that plugs straight into all of this. Admins can add or remove policies one at a time or by the thousand, and never worry about all the pages those changes ripple into.

Highlights

Views doing the heavy lifting

Complex queries across 10,653 state/category combinations, built entirely from Drupal Views relationships and contextual filters. No custom query code needed.

  • Drupal
  • Data Architecture
  • MySQL

Mirror-image indexes

Category and state index pages that each show policy counts for the other side.

  • Drupal

How it held up

NASBE retired the site in January 2025. For its four years online it stayed rock solid, with no big changes to how it was built. All the research and modeling up front is what let it last.

Stack & skills

  • Drupal
  • Feeds
  • Views
  • PHP
  • MySQL
  • Data Architecture

See my resume

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