What do you think of prepopulation to seed a service?
Travis: You also need to evaluate how good your data is.  Do you have confidence that people "recommending" teachers will input their names correctly, and not put in "John McPeebrain Doe".If you scrape data, be careful of that as well.  You can easily turn vistors off if your data isn't accurate (and you're only going to get one shot at convincing your user that your data is good).