<aside> 💡 Project Description: Illinois’ District 65 (Evanston and Skokie) is constructing a new elementary school in hopes of creating a more equitable access to education. To accompany this development, we redesigned District 65’s elementary school attendance boundaries by constructing an optimization model with an objective of minimizing students’ travel time and maximizing each school’s racial diversity.

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Preface

Our team worked on this project as part of Northwestern’s Analytics for Social Good course. Analytics for Social Good is a 10-week course catered for Northwestern students to work with partnered non-profit organizations to improve their decision-making frameworks using data science and analytics. Our team partnered with District 65, Evanston and Skokie’s school district.

Problem Statement

Prior to 2022, elementary school students in the Fifth Ward (an area in District 65) had to travel up to 30 minutes to school due to 1995 student assignment plan which drew attendance boundaries to address racial balance. Because the Fifth Ward had a high % of students of color, these students were assigned to elementary schools far from their homes to increase diversity in White-majority neighborhoods. With the development of a new elementary school in the Fifth Ward, District 65 is conducting a comprehensive analysis of the 1995 student assignment plan with the goal of modernizing the process, reducing busing and school operational costs and creating more equitable access to education for all.

Research

User Surveys and Interviews

We conducted surveys and interviews with different stakeholders of District 65’s community including parents and school teachers as well as representatives of District 65’s student assignment committee. Combined with publicly available data on District 65’s website and student assignment data provided by the assignment committee, we gathered the key insights below:

Key Insights

• Every elementary school in District 65’s is currently below the district’s capacity target of 85%
• Parents emphasized the importance of their kids attending neighborhood schools of walking distance (< 15 min. walk)
• Having diverse schools is important to parents and the student assignment committee, however, busing is not ideal for elementary students or the district’s budget
• District 65 has a strict racial diversity policy of “there must not be more than 60% of one race at a particular school”

Define

Through team brainstorming sessions, we defined 3 problems of the current attendance boundaries and 2 solutions we could implement:

Problem

Solution