Proximity Attendance Area Demographics

AAD Examples
Mililani area, Hawaii
Arlington County, VA
Spring Branch ISD, TX
East Syracuse-Minoa, NY

Attendance Area Demographics: Improving Educational Programs

Creating an environment for the best education programs possible requires attendance area demographics. Yet, most school districts do not have attendance area demographics beyond that developed from data about the students. There is a far larger and more detailed picture.

Attendance areas are defined by school districts as the geographic areas served by individual schools. These geographic areas largely exist without standardization from district to district and may be re-defined by the district annually in some cases.

Proximity builds custom school district attendance area, or zone, boundary files for use in mapping and related geographic information system (GIS) applications. Attendance area (AA) boundary files play a critically important role in analyzing and understanding demographic characteristics of students and their living environments.

Proximity uses specialized software to develop the attendance area demographics enabling school leadership and stakeholders to have their first view of "attendance area community" -- the neighborhood served by the school.

Benefits and Uses

Using attendance area boundary/map files with mapping software enables you to:

visualize how school zones relate to one another across the district.
examine demographic patterns among attendance areas.
view attendance area boundaries relative to other geographic entities:
- geocoded students by residence location.
- subdivisions and city boundaries.
assess impact of shifting one or a group of blocks to different AAs.

Attendance area demographics enable the following applications:

apply a cohort-survival method to ‘single year of age’ data to project attendance at the campus/AA level to future years
compare who resides in an elementary zone relative to building capacity/attendance using data for 5-11 year olds
use these essential data for attendance area balancing in redistricting.
better understand family/household composition; e.g., families per household and number of children per household
learn about the distribution of single parent households
assess distributions of English language proficiency: target special programs where needed.
address Title I school eligibility matters on broader issues than only students attending that school.
answer questions about household composition to give insights into balance/need for daycare facilities between AAs
principals can better understand "attendance area demographics" and improve discussion of "neighborhood/community" composition items at various meetings
provide a way to measure socioeconomic status and explain why some AAs have higher or lower performance; weigh relative socioeconomic status and explain why some schools perform better than others by some measures.
help school districts to know their audience when establishing a legislative agenda, bond vote proposal, etc.

An Informed Starting Point

Attendance area demographics provide an informed starting point. These data must then be used to assess issues and be a basis for developing the best possible projections about what will change when and where. A next, parallel, step is to geocode students to help decisionmakers better understand and act on many issues. For example, geocoded student data can help identify ineligible students who might be attending schools. Linked with attendance area boundary files and mapping software, it becomes easier and faster to visualize solutions.

[goto top]