More than 400,000 students and 600 schools comprise Chicago Public Schools (CPS), the third largest school district in the United States. To ensure the success of its education program, CPS has used GIS technology for approximately 10 years to fulfill its education plan to provide all its students with high-quality instruction, outstanding academic programs, and comprehensive student development that supports and prepares them for the challenges of the future.

The technology has helped CPS with busing and routing to schools in the city's 198 neighborhoods. However, until recently the organization did not have the resources to fully implement the GIS in an enterprise system for administrative operations. Administrative tasks were conducted using traditional methods with data that was not always the most current, which increased work demands for an already heavily tasked district. Giacomo Mancuso, the director of the Department of Demographics and Planning in the office of the CEO, needed a GIS application that would aid the department in its numerous tasks, including conducting demographic studies and school-by-school enrollment projections, establishing and adjusting attendance areas, planning new schools and additions, and providing GIS services to other departments within CPS.

"I'm in charge of doing both demographics and attendance area boundaries for schools," says Mancuso. "I've always looked at doing these tasks with as much technology and automation as possible. In the Board of Education, we have a system that assigns students to schools based on their address, but this computer system is 35 years old and is not geographically based; it's table driven. We needed a GIS application that would make everything more accurate and visually friendly so you can see where your address is and where the school boundaries are."

To combat this problem, CPS researched local vendors, then asked Kauser Razvi, the principal of Strategic Urban Solutions, a consulting company headquartered in Chicago, Illinois, to develop a strategic plan along with CPS to create a GIS implementation strategy and develop a GIS Web site. These would allow administrators and the public to access pertinent information about the schools in the neighborhoods and view school boundaries. The plan detailed how CPS should implement a GIS Web site that would meet the needs of all the groups involved within such a dynamic city that is undergoing numerous development changes in housing developments and neighborhoods.

The Chicago Housing Authority (CHA), which runs all the public housing in the city, provided a grant to CPS to help it develop the Web application so parents would be able to make better decisions about new neighborhoods if they are temporarily or permanently relocated by any of CHA's building and redevelopment projects.

"Many kids go to public schools, so when CHA makes development changes, it affects them," says Razvi. "There is a lot of new public and private development happening in Chicago, and when families move, or if the demographics of their neighborhood change, a GIS Web site is an easy and flexible way, rather than trying to call during school hours, for them to locate schools in their new area or find potential changes in their neighborhood school."

With great support for the GIS strategy, CPS worked toward an enterprisewide GIS implementation. Working with Razvi and Esri, CPS acquired an ArcGIS district site license, which included several fundamental elements. With the license, CPS has unlimited seat access to all of Esri's tools including ArcGIS Desktop (ArcView), ArcIMS, ArcSDE, and the ArcView 3.x family. The license also includes unlimited seat access to Web courses on the Esri Virtual Campus for any student or staff member in the district, several passes to the Esri International User Conference and Education User Conference, and technical support contacts.

With a strategic plan in place and the site license purchased, CPS hired Robert Hague, who had been working with the city's GIS Department, as its GIS manager. Hague contracted with Esri Business Partner Pangaea Information Technologies, Inc. (Chicago, Illinois), to help set up the GIS architecture and GIS-Solutions, Inc., to create the ArcIMS software-based School Locator application, which allows the user to identify the correct school a child should attend based on the address of the student.

"The main purpose of the application," says Mancuso, "is to put our boundaries online where parents and administrators can actually type in an address and return all the pertinent boundaries for elementary, middle, and high schools."

School Locator is designed to function as a point-in-polygon query. Using a customized geocoding service, which offsets the geocoded point from the street centerline, the correct polygon information is obtained from the geocoded point. Once an address has been submitted, ArcIMS returns the correct boundary, school, and grade information to the user. The application accesses data from ArcSDE, which contains more than 200 layers from CPS, the city of Chicago, Cook County, the Chicago Park District, and the Chicago Housing Authority.

The city of Chicago already has a very comprehensive ArcGIS enterprise in place, which facilitates data acquisition for CPS. With access to the monthly updated city and county data, nothing needs to be edited before Hague can incorporate it. However, once the data is used for the CPS application, the data must be cleaned. Boundary descriptions have not been updated to reflect current geographic features, so many boundaries intersect buildings, parks, and railroads. Also, revising boundary reports is complicated and requires Board of Education approval, which can also be complicated. However, once these hurdles are conquered, the benefits will be vast.

"Upon completion, the boundary geodatabase will consist of nearly 500 elementary attendance areas, including middle grades, and nearly 100 high school attendance areas," says Hague. "CPS also maintains two administrative boundaries—for both elementary and high schools. The attendance boundaries are maintained daily in ArcGIS, and updates will be published once new attendance boundaries are approved by the Board of Education."

The ArcIMS application has eliminated tedious manual work that involved going to a mainframe application, typing in an address, and entering information. As the ArcIMS application is implemented enterprisewide, CPS employees (numbering approximately 40,000) will be able to access information more efficiently, which is a necessity for such a large district. It has also given parents and community members an indispensable resource that will allow them to play a substantial role in deciding the future of their children.

"It's important to look at new ways to get information out to people," says Mancuso. "There are a lot of requests from parents about which school their child will attend, and before this application, there was nothing available to the public. They had to call a school or central office and have someone research the information for them. Now, they have a central location to get all the information they need. Within CPS itself, there are many requests to the Department of Demographics and Planning for maps and GIS information for different projects. The GIS implementation has helped us aid them efficiently. For example, we may need to map all the kids in the district in need of special education services by disability type and match them to schools that are Americans With Disabilities Act accessible."

Future plans for CPS include using its site license to introduce GIS technology to the city's schools. "In addition to the great need we have for administrative uses of GIS applications," says Mancuso, "we intend to bring it out to the schools and use it as a resource and technology tool." With several improvements already in place, CPS intends to use its GIS resources to bring the most current information and resources to its employees, schools, communities, and most important, its students.

For more information, contact Robert Hague, CPS (e-mail: rphague@cps.k12.il.us) or visit www.cps.k12.il.us on the Web.