SNM 2016-03-01: Hard Boundaries in 2014/15

2016-03-01: Hard Boundaries in 2014/15

This is how the existing hard boundaries would have assigned the 2014-15 kindergarten class to schools, with properly utilized buildings and no neighborhood transfers:

(Click to open PDF.)

This is taken from v3.0 of our SNM paper. The full explanation of this graph is in Chapter 7, but briefly:

Gray dots are students; gray boxes are schools.
In each school box:
- The bottom number ("x2") is the section count (# of kindergarten classrooms).
- The top number is the section size (# of students per classroom).
The section counts are "optimal section counts" derived from PPS's "School Optimal Building Size Analysis".
A colored line connects each student to her neighborhood school.

This is what the neighborhood school assignments look like, if you disallow neighborhood transfers and assign kids to their hard-boundary-specified neighborhood schools --- which is what the SACET changes implemented last year are intended to do. And this is what section sizes look like if you use the buildings as they were built, e.g., no kids crammed into boiler rooms. Section sizes vary enormously from school to school. If the kindergartners had been evenly distributed over the available sections, the section sizes at all schools would have been 27.5 (East side) and 31.6 (West side). Instead, we see section sizes ranging from 8.8 to 48.0 on the East side, and from 16.3 to 44.7 on the West side.