Geography major maps out school boundaries
Alumni & Friends, Winter/Spring 2005
When the fast-growing Mukwonago School District began experiencing overcrowding in its west side elementary schools, the district was faced with the daunting task of redistricting school attendance boundaries and bus routes. The Mukwonago School Board approached John Patterson, UW-Whitewater professor of geography and geology, for help.
“I knew that the university had the personnel and the necessary tools to help us with this project,” said Mukwonago Superintendent Paul Strobel. “John Patterson put us in contact with one of his students, Andrew Turner.”
Turner, who graduated in May 2004 with a double major in business management and geography, conducted a geographic information systems (GIS) analysis to help create hypothetical boundaries for the schools that would limit travel distance and balance out student enrollment.
“I used geocoding to assign latitudinal and longitudinal coordinates to all of the students and all of the schools in the district to determine where students lived and which schools were the closest,” said Turner. “After that, I conducted a nearest distance analysis to assign the closest 20 percent of students to each of the fi ve schools.”
Turner’s semester-long project resulted in new school district boundary lines that helped Strobel and the Mukwonago School Board alleviate overcrowding and underutilization in the fi ve area elementary schools.
“Working with the university was a positive experience and we would certainly use UW-Whitewater again in the future,” said Strobel.