Advances in Long-Range School Planning
In fall 2004, the Wake County Public School System contacted N.C. State University’s Operations Research and Education Laboratory about creating an analytical, data-driven process that incorporates land use and future developments into determining the best locations for new schools 20 years out. This will be a continuous long-range school and community planning process between WCPSS, Wake County government, the 12 municipalities, and the Capital Area Municipal Planning Organization, with the Lab coordinating updates. The new method improves upon the current system by adding advanced GIS technology, projecting school sites 20 years out as opposed to on a four-year bond cycle, and increasing municipalities’ involvement.
As part of the district’s Vision 2020 initiative, the new system will still use the Wake County Planning Department’s enrollment projections as a baseline, but the data will be broken down into smaller geographic areas than WCPSS has now. The Lab will work with the school system to construct an optimization model to generate target areas for school site land banking and help with deciding school attendance boundaries. Currently in the second of three phases, the Lab should have the final process in place by June 2006.
“I see this initiative as not only a means to improve the process for identifying sites for new schools, but also – and perhaps more importantly – to increase the level of cooperative planning with Wake County municipalities,” said Don Haydon, associate superintendent for Auxiliary Services.
In Phase I, which ran from April to August 2005, the Lab set up a series of interviews with county and municipal planning departments to identify planning regions. Departments differentiated regions by parcels of land (where possible), municipal and county lines, residential density, and the geometry of WCPSS student assignment nodes. To maintain consistency within the regions, each department agreed to use the Lab’s definitions of density. For example, very low density would mean there is less than one resident per acre; at the other end of the spectrum, very high density means there are more than eight residents per acre. It was determined that Wake County has approximately 280,000 parcels of land making up 1,134 WCPSS student assignment nodes and 6,150 planning regions (with 1 to 788 parcels per region).
Since school sites impact traffic, the Capital Area Municipal Planning Organization (CAMPO) was also involved in the project. CAMPO’s non-residential travel demand model, which forecasts demands on existing infrastructure, was integrated into the planning process.
Phase II of the project began in September and will wrap up in spring 2006. During this stage, the municipalities and the county will assign profiles to the planning regions and estimate future residential construction and general population increases. Together, the Lab and WCPSS will study the residential profiles to determine the potential number of students likely to be generated from each area. There will be opportunities to enter constraints, such as healthy schools criteria and other district policy requirements, into the site selection process as well.
After reviewing the planning region database in the final phase (April to June 2006), the Lab will generate a countywide “potential student map,” broken down by K-5, 6-8 and 9-12, year-by-year. These enrollment projections will allow WCPSS to identify the number of new schools needed per level per year. The Lab’s optimization algorithm will provide target areas for school sites each year. To generate optimal sites for the next year, locations will be fed back into the formula. With this data, WCPSS will be able to land bank feasible parcels for future use.
Over the last 15 years, the Lab has provided statistical data and research to aid more than 30 N.C. school districts in their student assignment and school site selection needs. The WCPSS project, however, is the Lab’s largest and most in-depth.