Optimal School Attendance Areas

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A parallel process in the determination of optimal school sites in the Integrated Planning for School and Community (IPSAC) process, is the creation of attendance boundary scenarios that minimize system-wide transportation costs while satisfying policy-based building capacities, demographic balance, and socio-economic and academic criteria.

Many school districts face challenges of developing attendance boundaries for existing schools or have proposed building sites and are concerned with new attendance boundaries. The Operations Research and Education Laboratory Laboratory (OREd) uses a sophisticated operations research algorithm to construct optimal scenarios subject to school board policies. Through the use of this algorithm, OREd is capable of producing multiple attendance areas exploring various constraints such as balanced school demographics, capacity utilization, or student academic achievement. These attendance area scenarios are mathematically based, unbiased, and are powerful tools that can be used to assist school districts to refine school redistricting objectives and to defend recommendations

Read description of these 3 map examples and view larger image in printable PDF format. (296 KB)*

The three attendance proposals shown here were for a growing school district struggling with demographic balance. The first proposal satisfies the demographic balance goal but leaves very little room in most schools to absorb future growth. The second and third proposals address this challenge by splitting the area (shaded in dark blue) and assigning the split-off portion to a fourth school all the while meeting the demographic balance goals.

*PDF document - requires Adobe Reader.