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GIS Applications Improve School District Disaster Planning and Response

GIS Applications Improve School District Disaster Planning and Response

Natural and manmade disasters create the need for school districts to have plans in place to understand their risks, respond to emergencies, and resume normal activities as soon as possible1. Geographic information systems (GIS) software can be an important resource for disaster planning and response teams.

[GIS] is a computer system for capturing, storing, checking, and displaying data related to positions on Earth’s surface. By relating seemingly unrelated data, GIS can help individuals and organizations better understand spatial patterns and relationships.2

For school districts, investment in a GIS application provides multiple benefits with respect to disaster planning and response.

Accurate district maps. A GIS application helps maintain accurate maps of district boundaries and building locations. The maps can be shared with city or county personnel to coordinate disaster planning. A FEMA article notes that during a disaster, “Timely, accurate information displayed on a map has always been useful to emergency responders.”3 An accurate map is also useful after a disaster when the district needs to send crews to evaluate potentially damaged sites.4

Understand proximity to hazards. A GIS application can store accurate data about school building proximity to natural disaster hazards such as streams or rivers, coast or fault lines, train tracks, chemical plants, and petroleum pipelines. Location is central to understanding risk,5 and the same GIS software can store and display estimates of risk from potential hazards. The combination of proximity information with data on vulnerability or risk can yield insights about where disaster is more likely to strike.

Identify affected students and families. GIS software can be used to identify and locate students and families affected by disaster in one or more areas of the school district. A disaster can include an outbreak of disease or a pandemic, and quickly identifying exposed students is an important part of a rapid and effective response.

The power of GIS is that the application can combine geographic data with demographic data, and the combination can produce useful insights for emergency planning.6 Susan Cutter, a geography professor at the University of South Carolina maintains that, “Knowing about the landscape of…social vulnerability helps to identify which populations may need assistance in preparing for, responding to and recovering from events.”7

Evaluate capacity to reassign affected students.If one or more of your buildings is unusable after a disaster, or if you need to help accommodate students from a neighboring district, you will need information about where you have capacity to reassign students. A GIS application can tie school building capacity information to student location data to help make the reassignment process as smooth as possible. The GIS application also makes it possible to share standardized and accurate information with multiple departments, for example student services, transportation and finance.

When a disaster hits an area or the school district itself, the superintendent and district leaders are central to the response. Anticipating potential risks, planning ahead, having reliable and up-to-date data and maps, and coordinating with other authorities are all essential to a rapid and successful recovery.


Footnotes

1) See for example, Emily Brown, Natural disasters drive need to update K12 emergency plans, January 17, 2019. https://districtadministration.com/natural-disasters-drive-need-to-update-k12-emergency-plans/

2) https://www.nationalgeographic.org/encyclopedia/geographic-information-system-gis/

3) https://www.fema.gov/blog/2013-06-07/big-picture-role-mapping-assessing-disaster-damages

4) https://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2017/11/29/8-tips-to-prepare-schools-for-potential.html

5) https://www.pewtrusts.org/-/media/assets/2017/08/fpc_flooding_threatens_public_schools_across_the_country.pdf, p.3

6) Nate Haskin, Beyond the Map: Building Competitive Advantage Through Leveraging Geospatial Data, CIOReview, Nov., 2018, p.8. https://magazine.cioreview.com/magazines/November2018/GIS/.

7) Quoted in Eric Holdeman, Nov 5., 2014, “How GIS Can Aid Emergency Management” https://www.govtech.com/em/disaster/How-GIS-Can-Aid-Emergency-Management.html

Benefits of Geocoding Student Data

Benefits of Geocoding Student Data

By David R. Johnston, GIS Manager, Educational Data Systems

A geographic information system (GIS) is a framework for gathering, managing, and analyzing data. Rooted in the science of geography, GIS integrates many types of data. It analyzes spatial location and organizes layers of information into visualizations using maps and 3D scenes. With this unique capability, GIS reveals deeper insights into data, such as patterns, relationships, and situations—helping users make smarter decisions.1

Businesses have been quick to understand the marketing advantages of GIS technology, but how can school districts benefit?

Let’s start to answer that question with an example from business—say, a restaurant. We are all familiar with online mapping applications like Google® Maps™and Apple® Maps. We can enter the address of a restaurant, and the app will then give us the restaurant’s location by putting a pin on a digital map. We can also access additional information in a GIS database such as photos of the restaurant, reviews, coupons, and any other information that has been linked to that location.

Public school districts use very different types of information, but GIS technology can link student-level data to a geographic location and reveal insights that can lead to efficient problem-solving. Districts can analyze where students live in relation to school facilities and develop solutions to challenges such as opening a new school, closing a school, reconfiguring grade levels, changing attendance boundaries, or balancing demographic groups across schools.

GIS technology connects students and their associated data to geographic locations through a process called geocoding.

What is geocoding?

Geocoding is a way of finding or seeing a location on a digital map. “Geo” refers to a map of the earth, and “coding” refers to putting a point on that map. Geocoding an address results in a set of X and Y coordinates that identifies a place on the earth where that address is located. Geocoding applications take addresses and convert them into X and Y coordinates that can be used in a GIS database.

How does geocoding work for school districts?

School districts geocode their student addresses so they can see where their students live on the map and analyze their student data geospatially, meaning in relation to where they live. The district enters addresses that are stored in their student information system (SIS) into a geocoding application, and the application returns the X and Y coordinates. The X and Y coordinates are pieces of data that can be added to student records.

Without an application that uses those X and Y coordinates and converts them to a point on a map, they are not very useful. So, once the X and Y coordinates are stored in the student records, they can be used in a GIS application that will convert them to points on a map. The GIS application may also provide tools for data analysis that combine multiple types of other data with the location information.

Ten Benefits of Geocoding Student Addresses

Geocoded addresses are used by school district administrators and planners to

  1. Double-check the accuracy of the addresses in the district’s SIS and make corrections according to the geocoded address information.
  2. Analyze transfer policies by looking at a map to see which students are living outside the district’s boundaries and which students reside in the district but are transferring to other schools within the district.
  3. Calculate the distance that students travel to school and review transportation (walking vs. riding) policies.
  4. Review school attendance boundaries to see if they are appropriately serving students living in or transferring into schools within the district, and, if needed, develop boundary change scenarios to provide data for decision-making.
  5. Analyze student counts by grade-level and review grade level configurations at schools.
  6. Analyze student demographic, program participation, and special needs data geospatially.
  7. Layer other types of data, such as economic data, crime data, and access to fresh foods over the district’s student data to see patterns, correlations, or gaps in programs or interventions that may be needed.
  8. Review feeder school patterns (i.e., elementary schools that send students to middle or junior highs, and middle or junior highs that send students to high schools) to (a) identify the nearest schools to where students live, and/or (b) review capacities and utilizations of the receiving schools by geographic areas.
  9. Help calculate enrollment forecasts using geographic areas smaller than a full school attendance area, potentially accounting for varied growth rates across the geographic area of the district.
  10. Identify students and enable communication with families who may have been affected by natural disaster.

As a school district, what do I need to do?

The district prepares a spreadsheet file of the student records from the SIS that contain at least a student ID and address. Addresses can be parsed (separated) into multiple segments (i.e., the house number, direction, street name, city, state, zip) or concatenated as one string.

Some GIS applications allow a direct connection (i.e., via an application programming interface [API]) between the district’s SIS and the geocoding application—in which case, geocoding the addresses is a more automated process than downloading and uploading data files.

Other student data such as name, gender, birthdate, program participation, race/ethnicity, test scores, and language proficiency can be included in the data file. The GIS application that uses the geocoded data can then report and analyze other student data in addition to the ID and address.

Does geocoding work for all addresses?

No, some addresses will return an error in the geocoding application. This can happen for a variety of reasons. For example, if any part of the address is incorrect or if the address is so new that it has not yet been included in the X and Y coordinate system, then the address cannot be geocoded. Large companies, like Google, Microsoft, and Apple, update their addresses and streets continually; but because streets change often, there can be gaps in their coordinate databases. Some districts’ SIS data will result in 100-percent-geocoded addresses, but others, depending on whether there is a lot of new construction in the area, may result in less than that.

What happens if an address does not geocode?

If an address does not geocode, it may need to be reviewed for accuracy and corrected in the SIS. Geocoding is a good way of checking the district’s SIS addresses and correcting them if needed.

If the street or address is correct but very new, it can be run through multiple geocoding applications to see if one of them has the new street or address coordinates in its database. If none of the available geocoding applications will geocode the address, geocoding may need to wait until later once the new streets are added and X and Y coordinates are updated.


Footnotes

1) “What is GIS?” on Esri.com

2018 Planning and GIS Resource Roundup

2018 Planning and GIS Resource Roundup

The end of the calendar year provides an opportunity to reflect on resources that we’ve found useful, intriguing, or beautiful. This blog provides a list—in no particular order—of five websites related to school district planning or geographic information systems (GIS) that caught our interest in 2018. We hope you will find these links helpful, and Happy New Year!

School District Planning. Facilities management at school districts has long been a place-based process. Advances in GIS tools present opportunities for districts to blend geographic data with other sources of information. Broward County, FL has been a leader in using GIS for data analysis and presentation. Their website offers excellent explanations for how GIS is useful to the school district in general and district planning in particular.

Desegregation. Desegregating public schools continues to be a hot-button issue in the US. This heavily researched article by Alvin Chang discusses how school attendance boundaries contribute to, or mitigate, segregation based on neighborhood patterns. The interactive maps and charts provide eye-opening visuals, and the article includes plenty of links to the supporting research.

Cartography. In “Storytelling with Maps on Paper and Screen,” cartographer Allen Carroll discusses the differences between maps for printing and maps for display on screens. Beautiful maps accompany the text to illustrate his conclusion: …print provides the luxury of space—of presenting lots of fine detail across the expanse of a sheet of paper—while digital gives us the advantage of time, enabling us to unfold a narrative along the razor-thin membrane between past and future.

Enrollment Projections. School district administrators in multiple departments must rely on enrollment projections in order to make effective plans for the future. Districts also need to keep an eye on nation-wide demographic trends. The National Center for Education Statistics provided a 2018 update with projections by region and state.

Citizen Science Projects Using Maps. As school districts continue to implement the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS), educators may find citizen science projects engaging and useful for students. This article by Diana S. Sinton for Directions magazine provides many links to citizen science projects that involve mapping applications.

Eddata Word Cloud

Is School Boundary Redistricting in Your Future?

By Susan M. McMillan, Ph.D., Senior Statistician and Researcher

Our family moved to Eden Prairie, MN during the middle of the 2011—12 school year. On an ice crystal-cold morning in January, I was pleasantly surprised to discover that a school bus would collect my boys at our corner. When we decided which house to purchase we had been under the impression that our family fell into the “walker” category because we lived only a few blocks from an elementary school.

The pleasant feeling faded as the other parents at the bus stop abandoned their “Minnesota nice” roots and described the acrimonious year-long redistricting process that had sent our neighborhood kids to a school about 1 and a half miles away. Read more

Why Map Data?

Why Map Data?

By Caroline Fahmy, President and CEO

Since our company’s inception, our Planware division has used geographic information systems (GIS) to view data. Our GIS software applications and services have helped map school district boundaries and model changes in school attendance areas. Using maps to model changes in the district’s geography (e.g., new streets or subdivisions) or student population (e.g., growth or decline in one or more areas of the district) assists school district planners in making decisions about how to utilize their school facilities more efficiently and, ultimately, better meet students’ needs.

Read more