This paper presents a classification system that assigns each of the 85,131 public elementary and secondary schools in the United States to one of seven locale settings. The seven mutually exclusive locale designations are: (1) large city; (2) mid-size city; (3) urban fringe of large city; (4) urban fringe of mid-size city; (5) large town; (6) small town; and (7) rural. The paper is presented in four parts. Part 1 provides an overview of the locale designations and their definitions. Results of the locale assignment process are presented by type of locale and state in table form. Part 2 analyzes the National Center for Education Statistics Common Core of Data Public School Universe by locale setting. Along with general observations about national school locales, states are clustered geographically and by wealth for school locale comparison. Part 3 is an appendix describing the methodology for assigning locale codes to the School Universe file. And Part 4 is an appendix containing tables of the results of the locale assignment. It is pointed out that code assignment is the first step in developing a uniform designation system and that several additional steps are planned or in progress to improve the designations. This paper contains nine tables. (Author/DHP)