» SPECIAL REPORT Forecasting the Future
GEOGRAPHIC INFORMATION SYSTEMS TECHNOLOGY KEEPS STUDENT GROWTH PREDICTIONS, TRANSPORTATION ON TARGET WRITTEN BY ART GISSENDANER
George Dailey, in-schools program
manager for GIS and mapping software provider Esri, said historically in school administration, GIS has been used in transportation and areas like demographic analysis and boundary planning. “Here it was easy for folks to see that
geography is part of the equation,” Dailey said. “Without the geographic tools and a geographic perspective, decision making is crippled and money is wasted. What has, in fact, been unfolding in recent years is that more school districts and educational institutions in general have come to see the geography that is part of these other key ar- eas in the graphic, such as safety and facilities and how common tools and data can help keep kids safer, and more efficiently operate the buildings and grounds.”
AHEAD OF THE CURVE West Fargo’s secret to its success has been
GIS can be used to digitize existing maps, as shown here during the 2007 Esri International User Conference in San Diego.
West Fargo North Dakota School District met to begin planning the district’s facilities needs for the 2013-14 school year due to student population growth, they had what amounted to a high-tech crystal ball that enabled them to glimpse into the future. When you can see what might lie ahead,
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you can better plan for contingencies, which is what Redmond and others have been doing for the past three years by utilizing a geographic information system, or GIS. Since then, they have been nailing student population shifts, facility needs, attendance boundaries and bus-route changes. “We’re in a district that is growing fairly
quickly,” Redmond said. “Tis is my 10th year and we’ve opened a new school every two years.” More districts are using GIS for bound-
38 School Transportation News April 2013
hen Transportation Direc- tor Brad Redmond and the Boundaries & Demo- graphics Committee of the
ary planning, new school placement and facilities. Steven McKinley, group operations manager at Trapeze Group, said facilities planning and route planning are driven by attendance boundary analysis. “GIS has become more prevalent because
you must adjust boundaries for each school’s capacity based on grade levels and class- rooms. Tat information is then sent to the transportation department to do their planning based on the new boundaries,” he explained. “If a school district is increasing its enrollment, it will look for new school sites and adjust the existing school boundaries to include the new sites. If the student popu- lation is declining and the district chooses to close a school, it would redistribute that boundary to existing schools.” He added that GIS software is scenar- io-based, so it can be used to gauge the impact of a school closing by running a series of scenarios. Officials then select the best scenario before the school is actually closed.
acquiring the Trapeze MapNet Redistrict- ing software, a GIS program developed by the Trapeze Group. Redmond said the system’s ability to gather and store data on student movement has been a boon to the district’s planning process because it allows them to project up to five years in the future. Te attendance adjustments the GIS tech-
nology enabled West Fargo to make for this coming fall are ambitious and apparently in line with officials’ predictions. All ninth-grad- ers will be moved to an existing high school; 10th graders will be divided between two high schools; all 11th and 12th grade students will attend one high school; and sixth, seventh and eighth graders will be divided between two middle schools. All the moves are based on the geographic locations of the schools and the populations in those areas. “All this is being managed by the redis-
tricting program,” Redmond said. “It is a map-based program that interfaces with our student software system. I don’t know what we’d do without it, I really don’t.” Redmond said the program plots student addresses on a map and gives their names,
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