Crazy Way To Set Display Order From an Enum

I’m sure someone has a better way to do this and I’m all ears; however, this seems to ‘work’ and performs well enough (YAGNI fully applied).

We have an Enum of our different “school levels”–elementary, middle, high schools, special schools, etc.  Since the Enum’s values correspond to the data values in our student system, their display/alphabetical orders do not match the common order (e.g. High School = 4, Middle School = 5).

I came up with a simple attribute that’s added to the Enum to “specify” display order and it’s worked like a champ for the past year or so.

[Description("Elementary")]
[DisplayOrder(1)]
Elementary = 2,

[Description("Middle")]
[DisplayOrder(2)]
Middle = 5,

Not at all fancy.

However useful it is at looping and providing context in code, what about using it for ordering OTHER “level” information from another source?  So far, I haven’t found a clean way.

The “Solution”?

Use the index of our already-ordered Enum list.  In this instance, our model’s SchoolLevel property matches the Description of the Enum.

            var levelsInOrder = Enum<level>.ToList();
            // AutoMapper mappings, etc.

            model.Data = data
                .OrderBy(x => levelsInOrder
                    .FindIndex(z => z.Description() == x.SchoolLevel));

Is it perfect? No, but it works. I could probably even refactor the Enum list and FindIndex call out for a bit more clarity.

        model.Data = data.OrderBy(x => x.GetDisplayOrder(x.SchoolLevel));

        ...

        private int GetDisplayOrder(string level)
        {
            return Enum<level>.ToList().FindIndex(x => x.Description() == level);
        }

Is there a better way?