K12Playground is a community-focused platform designed to help parents, students, and local residents discover schools and school improvement projects. In 2018, I led a full Drupal upgrade and redevelopment of the site, including a complete visual redesign and custom theme built to support better content structure. While the initial UI did not ultimately drive the level of engagement the organization hoped for, the search experience was a major success: I built a custom Solr-powered search that gave users fast, relevant, and highly filterable results across schools and programs.
Years later, in 2025, I returned to the project as a volunteer to support their mission more fully. With several more years of experience, I’m now working to reimagine the entire user experience so visitors can easily explore schools, understand the projects happening in their district, and feel more connected to their education community. This includes a complete UI overhaul aligned with their goals and a fresh Drupal 11 codebase built for long-term maintainability.