Horry County Schools Uses ArcGIS Indoors to Plan for Population Growth, Capacity, and Student Needs

In Horry County, South Carolina, growth is not an abstract challenge. It shows up in classrooms, school attendance zones, facilities requests, and long-range capital planning decisions. The county is home to the coastal city of Myrtle Beach, a tourism destination as well as a community that has attracted retirees and young families. 

For Horry County Schools, recent population growth has created pressure to expand, modernize, and make better use of facilities across this large, countywide school district. Serving about 47,000 students between 58 schools and several other buildings, the district totals 8.4 million square feet in a county footprint of about 1,255 square miles—larger than the state of Rhode Island. Since 2000, Horry County Schools has grown by almost 18,000 students, and since 2008, the district has built 11 new schools with one more underway. But while this growth has been exciting, it hasn’t been evenly distributed across the county. 

“Certain pockets of the county have grown much more rapidly than others, so we have some schools that are under capacity, and they appear to have space,” said Patrick Rhodes, geographic information system (GIS) coordinator for Horry County Schools. “But they aren’t close enough to the pockets of growth to handle more students.” 

Disconnected Data Shows Need for One System 

In the Horry County school district, principals receive staffing allotments from the district office with some latitude for how they program and utilize school buildings and classrooms based on student population. How an individual building is programmed and utilized can change from year to year, and this presents the need for Rhodes’ team to develop a more efficient way to monitor space planning. 

“We may not have known the breakdown of third-grade classrooms versus fourth-grade ones and the number of rooms needed or utilized in a grade without a system to maintain and inventory buildings.” said Rhodes. 

For years, the school district’s GIS and capital planning departments relied on a patchwork system of spreadsheets, computer-aided drawings, PDFs, and site visits to understand how each room in the buildings was being used. In the past, if a hurricane or a winter storm caused schools to close, district staff had to visit and use a spreadsheet to manually verify whether buildings had power or suffered other impacts from the storm. 

Facilities maintained its own spreadsheet record of rooms and current use, helping Rhodes and his team determine the functional capacity of each building given its current usage. 

The planning process across 58 schools was highly time-consuming, as staff would need to update these spreadsheets on an annual basis. 

Connecting Decision-Makers to Real-Time Facility Data 

“We always knew we wanted to find a way to do this work digitally,” said Joe Burch, executive director of capital projects for Horry County Schools. The school district had already been using ArcGIS technology since 1998 for attendance line planning, student assignment, and school site selection, but staff now needed to expand its use to indoor planning. They turned to Esri’s Professional Services personnel to help them digitize and visualize the floor plans using ArcGIS Indoors for all 58 of the district’s facility buildings. 

“Esri Professional Services has been a real force multiplier for us,” said Rhodes. “They’ve allowed the three of us to do something that you would need a team of full-time GIS professionals to do.” 

Initially, it was difficult for Horry County staff to gather all their building data to be digitized. “We have some schools that have been renovated three or four times, so making sure that we had the most up-to-date floor plans was important,” continued Rhodes. 

“The challenge that ArcGIS Indoors solves for us is that it plugs us back in and allows us to see what the on-the-ground situation actually is in our buildings,” Burch explained. “We didn’t have a way to do that very efficiently before.” 

Rhodes agreed: “[ArcGIS] Indoors allows us to have a situational management system to see how that school was built or what kind of capacity it has.”

The 2025–2026 school year was the first year Burch and his staff were able to use ArcGIS Indoors to generate their functional school capacity and building usage reports, and Horry County Schools has already seen success. The district allows some limited options for transferring students from one assigned school attendance area to another. Those options are curtailed for schools that are at 95 percent or more of their capacity. By tracking capacity and room usage in ArcGIS Indoors, the district was able to make faster decisions about space allocations. 

“I don’t remember things being easier than it was this year, now that people can see the data visualized,” said Burch. “[ArcGIS Indoors is] interactive, so it allows them to touch that data, and they end up receiving it better.” 

Using Indoor Mapping for Long-Term Operations and Facility Resilience

Now that district planning staff have ArcGIS Indoors to help them understand building use, they view it as an opportunity to apply it to meet other demands of a growing population. “What we have now is essentially the base layer that we needed to get into the buildings’ footprint,” said Rhodes. “We can build off of that and solve other problems.” 

Rhodes and Burch plan to use more ArcGIS technology in the future to help facilities technicians with maintenance requests and fire extinguisher inspection reports. 

“We want to accurately forecast where we’re going to need new schools in the next 10 to 15 years so we have a better understanding of how our buildings are being utilized,” added Burch. 

Additionally, the facilities planning department is looking at using ArcGIS Indoors so that the maintenance team can use the data to find assets within buildings, such as water, sewer, and electrical cutoff points. 

The district also hopes to implement ArcGIS Field Maps. Technicians can use it to look at the status of a fire extinguisher and then quickly fill out a report about the inspection and automatically feed that new data into ArcGIS Indoors. 

While the area Horry County Schools serves hasn’t experienced a major hurricane in several decades, facilities staff are still planning for the possibility. “We’ve tied our schools’ data into a dashboard so that in a recovery situation, we can bring schools back online and understand any impacts,” said Rhodes. 

Establishing a comprehensive digital view of its facilities, Horry County Schools has created a foundation that extends beyond capacity planning. And as the county grows, leaders see indoor GIS as a critical tool for ensuring that places of learning remain safe, efficient, and prepared as part of a modern, digitized school district.