What's fixed
Searching for a high school by name came back empty on the live site, both on High schools and in the high school picker on Me. School pages themselves were fine. Search now answers in a fraction of a second.
Behind the scenes
The database search read the whole high school table on every call. When that table wasn't in memory, it took longer than the site's three-second limit for public queries, so the site showed no results. The search now uses its name index on every call. A test checks that it stays that way.