Iowa City Community School District has implemented GuideK12’s geovisual analytics platform to support its 10-year, 258M master facility plan. The district currently serves 13,000 students, and is predicting rapid growth over the next ten years. Based on the growth forecast district administrators are implementing their first ten-year facility master plan that includes adding a third high school, three new elementary schools and renovations for two existing schools.
To support the growth expected in the Iowa City Community School district, COO David Dude, selected GuideK12 geovisual analytic software.
“Many of these tasks could be done with other GIS-type tools, but would take us twice as long and would require multiple sources to gather the needed information. With GuideK12, we have the ability to view data instantly and mapped geographically,” said Dude. “Our facility master plan includes measures to ensure school populations are evenly distributed.”
To ensure that all stakeholders are kept informed, the district is rolling out a new Community Engagement Process to establish collaborative, transparent lines of communication within the community. Recently the board passed a new diversity policy detailing requirements with regard to free and reduced lunch status students. This policy will require ongoing school boundary analysis using GuideK12.
In the past this process would have been done using a consultant who would be given the assignment, geocode students and run the stats. Using this old process, feedback could take weeks. GuideK12 provides the data and allows administrators to run scenarios in-house.
“The ability to run these scenarios, plug in options, build proposed boundaries and instantly see demographic reports will facilitate a much more efficient, flexible process. The last thing any district wants is to make a decision based on inaccurate data,” said Dude.
Iowa City Community Schools District is continually exploring and finding different ways to put GuideK12 to use. The ability to track open enrollment is one of those uses. “We can create a table of where students live versus what school they attend and visualize that on a map to see where we are losing students,” said Dude. “I see us being able to continue to expand how we use this functionality in the future along with mapping resource needs based on where certain student populations live.”
