Software is only part of the solution for the challenge of school boundary realignment. Sure, edulog sells software, but before recommending software, our demographic consultants take the time to analyze your district's requirements. You decide what level of edulog service you need for your district's project to be successful. Whether you need software or services or both, edulog can help.
School boundary realignment is basically the task of assigning the right number of students to the right schools. But what is simple to state can be complex to implement. Many factors other than location can affect a student's school of attendance.
Realignment may be necessary for any number of reasons including:- Class size reduction programs
- Growing, declining, or shifting populations
- Opening, closing, or relocating schools
- Changing school capacities
- Revised political or transportation mandates
Altering school boundaries is an elaborate process that can exhaust scarce district resources of cash, people, and time.
Our experience with school boundary realignment can give you efficient and objective solutions for evaluating and executing necessary changes.
No other company offers the unique tools and demonstrated experience your district needs to tackle challenging projects. Benefits provided by edulog's demographic consultants include:
- Experience with hundreds of school districts in 49 states gives us a firm understanding of district operations.
- We provide objective data analysis resulting in boundary solutions that meet your needs, budget, and timelines.
- We plan and present proposed solutions with the associated impacts, which reduces your workload and provides you.
- We plan and present proposed solutions with the associated impacts, which reduces your workload and provides you with an objective third party voice.
- We provide reports supported by quantifiable statistics, thus eliminating guesswork and giving you a solid foundation for making fair and efficient boundary decisions.
- We manage these politically sensitive studies alleviating pressure on district staff.
- We can tailor project plans to involve any degree of district commitment, thus allowing future studies to be conducted by district staff using edulog software.
You know your district's history, and we put it to use. edulog's demographic consultants use your historical data integrated with anticipated growth patterns to create accurate and justifiable plans for the future. You know your district's requirements, and we plan with those in mind. Each district has unique conditions, restrictions, and needs. Working cooperatively with your district's staff, edulog provides impartial, quantitative analysis supported by district data. You know your district's stakeholders, and we speak to them. edulog's analysis and reports provide a solid decision making foundation for parents, teachers, administrators, and the community.
- Simulation of new school boundaries and their effect on transportation and classroom balance
- Evaluation of proposals for changing transportation eligibility criteria
- Detailed boundary change analysis. A specific address (house) can be located as being in or out of the area.
- Graphic representation of student distribution maps
- Graphic representation of student density maps
- Plotter support for producing reports or presentation quality maps of resulting analysis
- Extensive data selection and query capabilities
- Standard and user-defined enrollment and boundary reports that can be promptly supplied through the system's powerful report-writer feature.
- Automatic "pin-map" generation of every student enrolled meeting specific selection criteria on any field in the student database such as grade averages, test scores, attendance data, ethnicity, etc.
"In 2001 the school board voted to renovate and reopen Garfield Elementary School for the 2003-2004 school year. To accommodate budgetary constraints, the administration was interested in recommendations for the closure of one elementary school. The district had a voluntary desegregation plan implemented in 1977. The new attendance boundary for the Garfield School was not required to conform to the 1977 plan and was to be built to accommodate the local neighborhood population. The primary objective of the project was minimal but adequate boundary realignment to satisfy the following goals: no building should exceed the maximum capacity, the racial composition of each school should not deviate more than ten percent from the current ratio, and current bilingual student assignments should be retained. This project included the implementation of the edulog planning system at the district and instruction in the use of the software.
"Space available choice, special needs classrooms and class size reductions represented only a portion of the programmatic variables that complicated student assignments in our district. In addition to objective and expert service, edulog identified and quantified the complex array of variables and provided alternative solutions for our District's realignment challenges."
"The edulog staff performed a politically sensitive boundary realignment study for the district involving the closing of one elementary school, the opening of another, and the distribution of special needs students to community schools instead of having these students attend only one school, as previously planned.
"The edulog staff listened attentively to our needs and was instrumental in providing our school district with the key elements needed for such a project."
"edulog's Demographic Services Department completed the software training, and on-site consulting including planning meeting facilitation in 2002-2003. The district is facing on-going redistricting and continue to use our consulting services on an as needed basis.
"With the help of an edulog Demographic Services consultant, we were able to show our redistricting committee the student queries, tallies and maps which we had produced using the edulog Boundary Planning software prior to the meeting. Using the edulog reports and the boundary maps as a starting point, the committee had the information they needed to discuss alternative options and parameters for additional 'what if' scenarios."
"Because of the thorough explanation and helpful shortcuts provided by edulog in the training, it was easy to make the requested changes and produce reports on the additional scenarios in time for the presentation at the next committee meeting."