By Melissa Bailey and Audrey Cerdan.

Every year, thousands of New Haven parents try their luck in a lottery for schools of “choice.” Most walk away disappointed: In 2012, “9,333 local and suburban students applied for 2,677 open seats at 29 charter and magnet schools covering grades pre-K to 12,” according to Bailey. Students who live near the school, or already have a sibling in the school, get first dibs on open seats.

Bailey wrote about this in a 2013 article. The interviews were good, but the data was … not so easy for the reader to picture. So Bailey recruited top Parisian digital journalist Audrey Cerdan to try to visualize it better.

Our mission: Give disappointed parents a better sense of their odds in the lottery, to inform their future choices. For example: Maria really wants her daughter to go to Barnard school, which has a fancy vegetable garden and a good reputation. But she lives way across town. What are her chances of getting in?

We answer that question — and many more — in this exciting data visualization. Click “search” to try it out.

We used Caspio because Bailey liked the interactive dropdown menus and got a free account at a recent Super Computer-Assisted Reporting Conference. BUT it was not so easy to use. And in the end we decided bar charts weren’t the best choice.

Our major hurdle was how to represent the concept of “zero.” As in, you have zero chance of getting into that school if you don’t live nearby. At the end of our struggle with Caspio, we thought of a better way to visualize the data. We think Infogr.am would be a much better way to really give a sense of a person’s odds. Here’s a sketch by Cerdan: