With prior NSF funding (SES 0921794, 0921279), the PIs at the College of William and Mary and the University of Minnesota created the School Attendance Boundary Information System (SABINS) data infrastructure project. It is designed to disseminate a rich, new data source of elementary, middle and high school attendance boundaries in a GIS framework via www.sabinsdata.org. The database currently contains 2009-2010 school year data on K-12th grade school attendance boundaries for three states (Minnesota, Delaware and Oregon), over 500 districts embedded in 13 metropolitan areas across the country, and over 5,000 unified school districts located in mostly rural areas. Each school attendance boundary in the SABINS database is integrated with population and housing data from the 2010 Decennial Census and the American Community Survey (ACS), allowing users to analyze an extensive set of the social and economic characteristics describing populations residing within each school attendance zone. SABINS data are also integrated with school-level information from the Common Core of Data (CCD) so that users can identify the characteristics of schools that supply services to each school attendance boundary.
This second phase of the SABINS project builds on the initial investment social science data infrastructure in two ways. First, the database adds annual, longitudinal updates to the existing geographic and tabular files so that users can explore school attendance boundary information for the 2009-2010 through the 2011-2012 school years. Since the ACS and CCD data are updated yearly, users will be able to explore the dynamic interplay between shifting educational geography, demographic change, and educational outcomes across schools and their corresponding catchment areas. Second, new activities will support an improved data retrieval system, enhance outreach activities and provide robust user support.
Broader Impacts This new phase involves a significant contribution to national cyberinfrastructure by making the SABINS data freely available to all users, including schools and school districts. Moreover, the project leverages NSF's existing investment into the National Historical GIS (NHGIS) housed at the University of Minnesota by improving existing software tools that optimize data dissemination and analysis of SABINS and associated data (ACS, CCD). The database is already being used widely for social science training, for policy research at the local, state and federal levels, and in the private sector. The SABINS project will be increasingly accessible for basic social science research, broadening the scope of local and regional analyses to explore variations across time and space simultaneously. The addition of longitudinal data combined with dissemination via the NHGIS at the University of Minnesota seeks to enable local, state, and federal administrators to deliver educational services more efficiently.
seeked to collect, standardize, and freely disseminate school attendance or catchment areas for thousands of school districts in the United States. These school catchment areas provide key information, including population and housing characteristics, about the neighborhoods within which schools are situated and from which schools draw their students. Scholars may use the data to study segegration and its impacts on school performance, the impact of the gerrymandering of catchment zones on school composition and performance, the impact that school quality may have on house prices among catchment zones. Prior to this effort, scholars would either create, at great expense, school catchment areas for a handful of school districts or use statistical units as proxies for school catchment areas. SABINS developed a data model describing these areas and then used the model to create tens of thousands of actual school catchment areas throughout the United States. The SABINS data are available, free of charge, through www.sabinsdata.org. The SABINS data collection consists of GIS-compatible mapping files describing the geographic boundaries of school catchment zones, summaries of US census data for catchment zones, and crosswalks linking schools to their catchment zones. SABINS has attendance catchment data for 6,058 school districts for the 2009-2010 academic year, 590 school districts for the 2010-2011 academic year, and 337 school districts for the 2011-2012 academic year. Users who have questions about the data or the data access system may email questions to sabins@umn.edu.
