ArcView illustrates student populations, future development areas, and attendance boundaries along with enrollment forecasts with the SchoolSite extensions.

Over the last 10 years, the Corona-Norco Unified School District (CNUSD) in Riverside County, California, east of Los Angeles, has grown from 21,000 K-12 students to more than 37,300 students. To manage this large growth in student population, new school locations were analyzed and openings occurred for six elementary schools, along with a new intermediate and new high school. In addition, the location and placement of more than 485 portable classrooms were required to provide for growth and class size reduction initiatives at various other school sites. Finally, the addition of new schools and increases in facility capacities around the district required adjustments in attendance boundaries at more than a dozen schools to balance enrollment.

Even with the monumental challenges of finding space to house the large numbers of incoming children, the Corona-Norco district was up to the task. The school district has been using a combination of ArcView and the SchoolSite Redistricting extension for ArcView to assist in the planning process.

According to Lynda Jankel, manager of the facilities planning department at CNUSD, "The use of ArcView and SchoolSite has saved time, time, and more time. The use of GIS provides a quick response to staff and community queries and makes many needed planning tasks possible with a small staff."

In the past, most school districts have manually coded student record data with planning area numbers based on their address and have utilized a great deal of IT staff time for producing tabular reports in any school attendance boundary change process. In many cases, special reports had to be developed to address the varied questions from staff and boundary committee members. The use of GIS has streamlined that process tremendously to the point where boundary changes have bec