Can a Family Tell You Apart?

A two-minute exercise for enrollment directors and the people who write the words families read first.

Try it with your own paragraph → https://tellapart.haitani.org

Have you ever read a peer school's website — a little competitive research on a slow afternoon — and thought, their language sounds a lot like ours?

This tool checks. Paste the paragraph your school uses to describe itself — the About page, the Why-us section, the mission — and in a few seconds you'll see which of your phrases also appear across nearly 3,000 other schools' own self-descriptions, which words the whole sector reaches for, where your paragraph sits among schools shaped like yours, and the sentences that are yours alone.

What comes back has two layers.

The first is the everyday words. More than half of all schools use the word community. Academic and learning run just as high, and they run high everywhere — elementary schools and high schools alike. These words are true, and they're doing necessary work. Schools share this vocabulary because they share these values, and no admission director should scrub community from an About page because other schools mean it too.

The second layer is the signature phrases, and those turn out to be dialects rather than clichés. Whole child appears on seventeen percent of elementary schools' pages — and on zero high schools'. College preparatory is the mirror image: half of secondary schools say it, and almost no K–8s. The phrases we think of as everyone's are mostly our own segment's.

There is no grade in it. The shared layers are doing their jobs — the everyday words say what we all value, and the segment phrases say what kind of school you are. What the tool gives you is the mix: how much of your paragraph is the sector's voice, and which sentence could only be yours.

The reason it exists: when a family sits down to read your page alongside three others, what makes your school memorable? That's the reader it's built around — a parent, on a laptop, late at night, with four tabs open.

Before you start: nothing you paste leaves your browser, and there's no login. You can filter to your division and compare against all schools, nonsectarian schools, or faith-based ones.