School Geography Guide
Introducing the School Geography Blog Series
As the first company to offer a commercial GIS data product that include school boundaries (both school districts and school attendance zones), we’ve come to understand some of the unique characteristics of what we call School Geography. We thought that we’d share some of that knowledge with our Blog community.
Why School Boundaries Matter
Change is a Constant for US School Districts
Why US Census School District Boundaries Are Not Good Enough
How School Attendance Zones (SAZ’s) Get Their Shapes
Schools and School Locations
Why School Boundaries Matter
You can’t see school boundaries and most of us are unaware of exactly where they are but school districts and more importantly, attendance zones, determine which schools our children attend and that has a profound impact on everything from our daily lives to their futures.
School Boundary Definitions
School districts are the basic units around which public schools are organized and operated. They represent an official administrative units as well as distinct geographic areas.
School Attendance Zones are the areas within school districts that assign collections of households to specific public elementary, middle and high schools. School Attendance Zones (SAZs) are generally determined by local school boards and allow them to distribute and balance the student population with available classroom space and resources.
Maponics School Boundaries TM
While the US Census is a source for school district boundaries (though they are only updated every two years), the only source for school attendance zones are local school officials, which is exactly where we obtain the data for mapping SAZ boundaries.
As of the first release (May 2010), 14,000 school district boundaries and 134,000 school points are available nationwide. School attendance zone boundaries are available for many major metro areas, representing student population coverage of 20%.
More Information About Maponics School Boundaries
See school boundaries in action in our school boundaries interactive mashup.
For more info, check out our school boundaries FAQ page.
Change is a Constant for US School Districts
This is the second post in the School Geography Blog series.
In early America, schools were organized by a group of neighbors or perhaps a larger community and were largely independent of one another. New England colonies first provided for a public education, requiring that towns establish schools. This township-based model extended to the midwestern states and eventually many western states. The township boundaries, usually defined by states, became the first school districts. Some still exist in their original form, but many have consolidated into larger districts.
Education in the South was generally a private matter until after the Civil War. When public schools were established there, counties generally became responsible for them. This is why school districts in most southern states generally have the same borders as their counties or county-equivalents.
In the beginning of the 20th century, schools began consolidating into larger and larger districts, sometimes through local action but more often as a result of state legislation. Of the 200,000 districts that existed in 1900, fewer than 14,000 still exist. Because of continuing and sometimes dramatic population shifts and economic factors, many areas of the country are grappling with the need to redraw school district boundaries. Even New England states, which have largely retained districts that had coincided with their town boundaries since the 1650’s, are likely to radically merge and realign their districts in coming years. And state legislatures everywhere will often have more say than local residents in how school district boundaries will be drawn.
Of course, with continual change comes the need for current representation of school district boundaries and related school and school attendance zone information. As we mentioned in the last post, the US Census (TIGER) updates their school district boundaries file every 2 years— this means many changes to school districts are not reflected until long after they are put into effect and don’t necessarily represent information for the current school year. Further, TIGER lacks the more granular and in many ways, more important, attendance zones within school districts.
For Maponics School BoundariesTM, we annually source and update the entire set of school geography (including school district, school attendance zones and school profiles) for every locally-sourced area. Under our Maintenance Program, we revisit and verify the district’s information each year. This ensures that our customers, who rely on our data currency and accuracy to display schools, school district maps and attendance zones, have the latest information available.
Why US Census (TIGER) School District Boundaries Are Not Good Enough
This is the third post in the School Geography Blog series.
The Congress requires the Census Bureau to create special tabulations of decennial census by school district boundaries to support calculations for such allocations as Title I funding. Every two years, the Census conducts a review of school districts and collects paper and sometimes digital map data from designated state school district mapping coordinators. The TIGER school districts were last updated with the release of TIGER 2008 and contain boundaries submitted during the 2007-2008 School District Review Program (SDRP). As a result, the TIGER school district data may now be as much as three years old and the next file will not be available until November 2010, long after the 2010-11 school year begins.
With demographic shifts, financial issues, and failing schools, the rate of change (events like district mergers and splits) in school district boundaries is on the rise. In the last 30 days alone, there have been stories on consolidations (or potential consolidations) in 9 states (PA, IA, IL, VT, MS, AR, KS, WI, and NJ).
For Maponics School Boundaries TM, we source school district boundaries and school attendance boundaries directly from contacts at the local level, rather than at the state level. And we review and update the entire set of school geography (including school district, school attendance zones and school profiles) for every locally-sourced area every year. This ensures that we reflect all of the latest changes every year and that our customers can count on the fact that they have the latest information available.
In the spirit of full disclosure, we base our nationwide school district boundaries on TIGER data but continually enhance them with locally sourced data and add school attendance zones–something that TIGER does not include at all.
How School Attendance Zones (SAZ’s) Get Their Shapes
Local school boards generally establish where students attend public schools—and they do so by defining a geographic area (often called a school attendance zone) of residences associated with each public school. Some school districts have only one school for each grade range, so their SAZ’s are coextensive with the school district boundaries. But most school systems operate more than one elementary school, middle school or high school. In order to balance the number of enrollments and the needs of the student population with available space and resources, school boards establish school attendance zones.
School district boundaries change to reflect underlying demographic shifts and numerous other social, economic and political factors. Well, school attendance boundaries are even more likely to change for two primary reasons:
- By definition, schools attendance zones are established and adjusted to balance student populations within school districts and as a result, they often change over time even when school district boundaries do not: and
- Schools attendance zones are directly associated with school locations themselves—geographically, they are represented as a boundary around a single school. So, as schools are created, expanded or closed, school attendance zones change.
For example, in Frisco, Texas, where I happen to live, significant population growth means that school attendance zones may have to change almost every year for the foreseeable future.
How We Source and Build School Attendance Zones (SAZ’s)
Neither the federal government nor most states maintain a school attendance zone boundary set. These have to be sourced from the local school districts. This is a daunting task in that there are almost 14,000 US school districts with school attendance zones and they record these boundaries in a variety of formats—many of which are not in high-quality digital maps.
We go directly to local authorities to collect all sorts of resources to define the limits of the SAZ’s. Sometimes we are able to acquire digital map data, but most often districts only share paper maps, low quality PDF’s, or provide a list of school assignments by address range. We take all of this raw data, import or digitize it, clean it up, make it all match up with street centerlines, satellite and aerial imagery and other school districts borders and attendance zones. Now imagine repeating all of this 14,000 times and updating them annually!
But, we understand the value in doing this because so many decisions, from real estate purchases to public policy to direct marketing, can be driven by defining a clear and consistent relationship between residences and public schools.
Schools and School Locations
There are over 130,000 public and private schools in the United States. Currently, the most comprehensive list of schools is maintained by the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES)—but even this source is far from perfect in terms of completeness and accuracy.
Firstly, although public schools are required to report to the NCES annually, depending on when changes (e.g. new or consolidated schools) occur and the fact that the NCES generally does not publish results until about a year after the reporting cutoff, some of its data can be as much as two years old.
Further, around 2000, the NCES added lat/long coordinates for the schools in its databases by geocoding the schools’ addresses against TIGER and perhaps another street dataset. However, we find that the placement of many of these schools is considerably off, many miles in some cases.
Maponics School Boundaries TM
We annually source and update the entire set of school geography (including school district boundaries, school attendance zones and school locations and profiles) for every locally-sourced area. Under our Maintenance Program, we revisit and verify the district’s information each year. As part of this process, we work with local resources and officials to ensure that we represent the latest information about all the schools within the district.
We start with the NCES database and state lists and then go directly to the school districts to ensure we represent all public schools in our data and know where they are located. We geocode any addresses obtained against a high-quality dataset and take any locally-sourced point sets and update these using aerial and satellite imagery to move the point to the rooftop of the school.
Of course, with Maponics School Boundaries, the value comes not just from the comprehensive database of schools but the combination of the database with the related boundaries, including school attendance zones and school district boundaries.