As policies change and schools strive to offer the most they can to their students, technology offers hope to administrations for meeting their goals.

The No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act is creating extensive, as well as controversial, reform in schools across the United States. While the admitted focus of the law, signed into effect in 2002, is on improving academics, the strict guidelines affect school budgets, planning, and transportation.

The NCLB Act requires all school districts and states to implement school improvement plans that promote school success and meet adequate yearly progress (AYP) goals. Those schools that do not meet AYP are identified for school improvement, corrective action, or restructuring, and the students are eligible to transfer to another public school that is not in need of improvement. It is the school's responsibility to provide an explanation of the options to all parents of students in a comprehensive, easy-to-understand format and in a language that is clear to the parents. The notification must inform parents that their child is eligible to attend another public school, identify each public school the child can attend instead, and include information on the academic achievement of the schools. The school district must also provide transportation to the new school, subject to its current transportation policies that are related to the distance to the schools. The law establishes some joint funding mechanisms, but the school must still spend a certain amount of its funding on choice-related transportation.

Detroit Public Schools (DPS) is one of the many school districts across the country that requires additional procedures and technology to comply to the NCLB Act and control costs associated with the new transportation requirements. The district was one of the first school systems in the United States to obtain a GIS school district license, long before the act came into effect. School faculty used ArcView for administrative purposes, and many of the schools use it in the classroom. The school district combined the technology it was already using with the Esri Business Partner Education Planning Solutions' SmartR extension for ArcView to comply with new regulations. "With the student transportation extension," says Randy Raymond, GIS specialist for the DPS Office of Student Transportation, "it is not only possible to provide better transportation scheduling and planning, it is also possible to work with the Compliance Office to provide school choice options that help control and predict the costs associated with the transportation factors of the NCLB Act school choice provisions."

In addition, Raymond and partners at Eastern Michigan University built an application with ArcView, ArcSDE, and ArcView Network Analyst to create the SMRT (Strategically Managing Resources Through Technology) Vehicle Management System, an application that performs data processing tasks and complex spatial analysis functions. The database design includes a separate database for information the district has about students, transportation, street centerlines, and school buildings. Using this information, they created point files and input the data into ArcView. Raymond customized the ArcIMS interface and associated functions using Java and DHTML technology. The resulting Web-based system allows transportation administrators and the public to view bus stop locations, query bus stop location data, and perform online location queries, and it allows authenticated users to view routes, browse school performance charts, and perform other functions that give them thorough information about each school.

"In the spring of the 2003/2004 school year," says Raymond, "DPS notified the parents of 78,000 students that their children were attending a school that had not made adequate yearly progress. As a result of this notification, 932 parents, guardians, and students wanted to exercise the option to attend a school that had met adequate yearly progress."

The SMRT Vehicle Management System helped the DPS Office of Student Transportation predict potential costs associated with transportation requirements of the notification. The application showed the location of the students who requested the opportunity to attend a succeeding school and the schools that were offered as choices for the eligible students.

"For NCLB purposes," explains Raymond, "the determination of a need for transportation services for any students is based on living more than 1.5 miles from the selected or choice school. If we allow the students, parents, or guardians to simply select a school from the list of 54, then it would be difficult to predict the potential costs and needs associated with the transportation of these students. With NCLB, for the first time, we can use federal dollars for transportation. What we're trying to do is control the costs because the choice opportunity that we give them would have kids all over the city, and we'd be transporting them everywhere. It saves us at least a million dollars in preplanning, right off the top."

Using the SMRT Vehicle Management System, it is possible to identify two different school choices for each student. The closest school to each student is identified, and a distance to the school is calculated. The process is repeated by eliminating the first choice and coming up with a second closest school. The process results in a map that displays a first choice and second choice school for each eligible student. By viewing the attribute table for a particular school, users can work with a list of the information.

Raymond adds, "With GIS, it is possible to predict how many of the students would be eligible for transportation services based on a 1.5-mile distance to school. For example, if all 932 DPS students choose to attend the first choice school, a total of 277 students would be eligible for transportation services. If all the students choose to attend the second choice school, then 564 students would be eligible."

Not only does the application predict bus routing and scheduling costs and needs, it enables the school district to meet the communications requirements of the NCLB Act by providing a notification that is comprehensive, understandable, and in a language the parents/guardians understand. They can easily access the Web site to look up possible schools for their children, read school progress reports, and view other important information for their school.

"The use of GIS in DPS has dramatically changed the way the school district operates," continues Raymond. "At a time when school districts across the country are confronted with declining enrollments, decreased revenues, and issues related to NCLB, it is essential that they begin to leverage technology to efficiently manage student transportation by providing geospatial analyses of the student data for other management units within the school district. We're expanding the use of GIS to include managing transportation issues involved with supplemental education programs that are also a result of NCLB."

For more information, contact Randy Raymond, GIS specialist, Detroit Public Schools (tel.: 248-910-7830, e-mail: randall.raymond@detroitk12.org or aerraymond@aol.com).