Making Individual School Enrollment Projections Using "Micro-Geographies"

Valerie Edwards, Los Angeles Unified School District
Mary Prichard, Los Angeles Unified School District

The Los Angeles Unified Schools District (LAUSD) makes enrollment projections for over 600 schools annually. A key challenge is that the schools' projections are keyed to their attendance boundaries, but the data needed to support those projections are registered to geographies that aren't necessarily consistent with attendance boundaries. A second challenge is that school choice is made available at some LAUSD schools through option areas, which are geographical areas where the attendance boundaries of multiple schools overlap. In this paper we discuss a method that addresses both geographical scale and student choice by using a set of 'micro-geographies' that are created when the discrete geographies of the data sets are consolidated and their respective data are distributed using a spectrum of allocation methods that respond to the parameters of each of the geographies.