TransWikia.com

Where to get school zone shapefiles?

Geographic Information Systems Asked by Nathan Hurst on November 30, 2020

Census.gov usually makes available the shapefiles containing school zone boundaries. Due to the US government shutdown, census.gov is down. Does anyone know where to download a recently archived copy?

4 Answers

Code for America has a collection of data backed up from the census.gov websites, including the school zone data.

Another (privately curated?) collection of backups, including the unified school districts, can be found at https://census-backup.s3.amazonaws.com/index.html.

Correct answer by Jake on November 30, 2020

A better place is SDDS (School District Demographic System) from the Dept of Education where you can download public schools (points), district boundaries(polygons), school attendance boundaries (polygons), private schools (points), universities(points) and NAEP State-wide data(polygons).

Inside of the map viewer there is a tools menu where you can download data based on your selected state.

A couple of reason why I think SDDS is the best place to get school data:

  • It contains the latest school attendance areas for the top 500 districts (by population). A school attendance area is the polygon which encompasses students enrollment in a school. Census simply does not collect this information. This data is updated about every 6 months as new attendance areas are collected.

  • The school district data contains a custom tabulation of the 2000 and 2010 decennial census information aggregated to the district geography, along with the American Community Survey (ACS) 1,3,5-year estimates. This was done through a join effort between Census and Dept. Ed.

  • Outside of just downloading the shapefile, there is a build a table tool where you can access more than 100,000 different demographic estimates at the school district level which you can then join on to your spatial data. The tool is called "build a table", its a little clunky, but has improved.

Unfortunately right now the government is shutdown, but when that is resolve you can visit:

http://nces.ed.gov/surveys/sdds/

The map viewer is a flash application, if you can't load flash let me know and I'll get you some direct links for downloading the data you need.

Answered by bcollins on November 30, 2020

https://nces.ed.gov/programs/edge/sabs

The School Attendance Boundary Survey (SABS) was an experimental survey conducted by the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) with assistance from the U.S. Census Bureau to collect school attendance boundaries for the 2013-2014 and 2015-2016 school years. The SABS collection includes boundaries for more than 70,000 schools in over 12,000 school districts throughout the U.S.

Answered by Austin on November 30, 2020

Even thought the question is outdated, a good place for similar cases is the internet archive wayback machine. If you are lucky, on older version of the website and the files hosted there is stored for downlaod: https://archive.org/web/

For the original request, see an older version of the site, dated April 12, 2019: https://web.archive.org/web/20190412013854/https://www.census.gov/geographies/mapping-files/time-series/geo/tiger-line-file.html

Both screenshots done Nov. 9, 2020: enter image description here

enter image description here

Answered by babel on November 30, 2020

Add your own answers!

Ask a Question

Get help from others!

© 2024 TransWikia.com. All rights reserved. Sites we Love: PCI Database, UKBizDB, Menu Kuliner, Sharing RPP