1. INNOVATIVE DATA COLLECTION TECHNIQUES
FOR PUBLIC SCHOOL BOUNDARIES
Management Information Systems Conference
Presented by Tai Phan, Andrea Conver & Amy
Ramsdell
NCES, Sanametrix & Blue Raster
2/14/2013

2. School Boundary Geodatabase
History
 Continuation of the School Attendance Boundary Information
System (SABINS)
 Headed by Prof. Salvatore Saporito, The College of William & Mary
 David Van Riper, Minnesota Population Center
 www.sabinsdata.org
 First release in the SDDS Map Viewer in May 2012
 2009-2010 school boundaries for the top 350 districts
 Census Bureau is summarizing the
data by school boundary

3. Current Data
4

4. School Boundary Technologies
 Using ArcSDE 10.1sp1
 Using ArcGIS Server 10.1 EC2
 Python (Arcpy)

5. Data Model

6. Data Processing Workflow
 Collectboundaries
 Dissolve boundaries into a 1 to 1 format
 Associate boundaries with NCESSCH ID
 Perform QA/QC
 Sync data to the Cloud

7. School Boundary QA/QC
Procedures
 Confirm
that all regular schools have a
boundary
 Confirmthat all attributes are correct and
correspond to the NCESSCH school ID
 Confirmthat every geographical area is
served by every grade

8. Contact and Data Tracking
Application
 Tracksall contact between the district and
the Census collection team
 Stores original data type
 Records the date completed and user name
for each processing step
 Generates a variety of reports

10. Public School Boundary Collection
and Verification
 Collect
boundaries for all 13,000+ U.S.
school districts
 Combination
of data collection efforts by
Census and a “group-sourced” mapping
effort
 The 2013-2014 school year will serve as a
trial year

11. School Boundary Collection
Workflow

12. Public School Boundary Collection
and Verification Tool Demo

13. Census Bureau Tabulations
 Block rectification to create publicly available
population counts and related information
 These boundaries can be used for custom
tabulations that meet the Census Bureau’s
disclosure policies
 Provide population counts at the school
attendance boundary level
 Product is not the same boundary lines as
delineated by the districts

14. The Significance of School
Attendance Boundaries
 Benefits to the Districts
 Benefits to the State
 Benefits to social science

15. Moving Forward
 Changes will be made to the workflow and
tools based on process reviews and user
feedback
 The process will become easier and easier as
more districts use the online collection and
verification tool

16. For More Information
Andrea Conver Amy Ramsdell
(202) 600-8167 (703) 842-0177
aconver@sanametrix.com aramsdell@blueraster.com