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Rock Hill School District Three, Rock Hill, South Carolina

OREd worked with the RHDS 3 to look at attendance scenarios, refine demographic balance constraints, and use "what-if" scenarios to decide on a plan.

Rock Hill School District Three (RHDS 3) experienced a very painful school redistricting in 2003 that resulted in a law suit and divided the community. The charges for the the Operations Research and Education Laboratory (OREd) were:

• Develop school attendances to achieve demographic balance using all available student demographic attributes; and
  
  
• Work with the 35-member growth management committee that included several members who were appointed by the court.

OREd’s first task was to work with the committee that articulated the demographic attributes to be considered, and eliminate those attributes that were only anecdotal and could not be analyzed with data. OREd extracted attributes from the student data and Rock Hill geographic information systems (GIS) data and produced numerous attendance scenarios that examined balancing by race, F/R, test scores, and housing market values. One of the best decisions OREd made was to present the scenario output to the committee WITHOUT any maps. Without maps, committee members were focused on evaluating the merits of scenarios by whether they achieved the desired school demographic balance goals. This exercise allowed the committee to eliminate less desirable scenarios and further refine balance constraints.

With much refined constraints OREd re-ran the model and provided the committee with four final scenarios, now with maps. Using the Scenario Builder tool developed by OREd, the committee was able to simulate “what-if” while bounded by demographic balance constraints previously agreed by all. Once the “what-if” questions were exhausted, the final scenario was decided.

The intangible success of this project did not come to fruition until later. Due to RHDS 3’s creating school attendances that are demographically balanced, there is no longer a perception of disparity in the quality of the schools. This perception change was reflected in the way that new residential subdivisions are allocated to individual school districts; instead, the entire system has benefited from the recent growth.

Rock Hill School District Three Website is www.rock-hill.k12.sc.us.