Building the School Attendance Boundary Information System (SABINS): Collecting, Processing, and Modeling K to 12 Educational Geography

摘要

The School Attendance Boundary Information System (SABINS) is a social science data infrastructure project that assembles, processes, and distributes spatial data delineating K through 12th grade attendance boundaries for thousands of school districts in the United States. Until now, attendance boundary data have not been made readily available on a massive basis and in an easy-to-use format. SABINS removes these barriers by linking spatial data delineating attendance boundaries with tabular data that describe the demographic characteristics of populations living within those boundaries. This paper explains why a comprehensive GIS database of K through 12 attendance boundaries is valuable, how original spatial information delineating attendance boundaries is collected from local agencies, and techniques for modeling and storing the data so they provide maximum flexibility to the user community. The goal of this paper is to share the techniques used to assemble the SABINS database so that federal, state, and local agencies can apply a standard set of procedures and models as they gather data for their regions.