Best Practice for List Views (Sections)

What are people doing to create essentially different list views (traditionally just called data views in database land)? For example, I have a ‘person’ type and some of those people are tagged with ‘student’ role so that I can isolate them when creating the student only section/list view. Up to now I just create a content/student directory and put a single dummy file in there. In the section/student.html file I loop through range where .Data.Pages "Section" "person" and test for a student param. So I really do not need a content/student directory at all. Is there some way to not require this empty directory in the content folder?