Campus Operations Blog

Ensuring safety across a large school district requires more than traditional emergency plans. For the Palm Beach County School District, the tenth-largest school district in the United States, protecting students and staff means preparing for emergencies across hundreds of campuses and thousands of buildings. 

In recent years, CSULB has embraced Geographic Information Systems (GIS) as a foundational technology to modernize campus operations, improve safety, and enhance data-driven decision‑making. By creating a unified geospatial platform, the university has mapped its underground utility infrastructure and integrated this data with digital and hard copy as-built documentation, track ADA accessibility corrections, create dashboards displaying ecological and sustainability benefits analyses from tree data, map fire and safety equipment, provided time critical spatial data for construction management teams, map facilities managed assets and create an integrated repository of building floor plans as well as active operational chargeback work orders. This digital revolution has transformed how Physical Planning, Energy, Construction & Facilities Management operates every single day.

Wake County Public School System (WCPSS) just went district-wide with an ArcGIS Indoors implementation, mapping over 27 million sq ft of space across 220+ campuses.

This project isn’t just about maps, it’s about breaking down data silos, improving safety, facility management, and empowering organizational workflows with a single source of truth for facilities and operations. From indoor navigation to asset management and real-time collaboration, WCPSS is setting a new standard for smart campus operations.

Read the full success story to see how GIS is reshaping school districts!

Managing underground utilities on a campus can be challenging, especially when as-built records are outdated, incomplete, or flat out do not exist. Here's how Brigham Young University-Idaho utilized thermal imagery to improve our smart campus GIS.

I created a data integrity system for my university's campus tree inventory. In this blog, I will explain the tree inventory system we used and the steps I took to enforce data integrity using a tool called Contingent Values in ArcGIS Pro. 

176 buildings. One authoritative dataset. A blueprint for sustainable Indoor GIS in K-12.

Baltimore County Public Schools (BCPS) needed more than a map — they needed a system that facilities managers, security teams, and first responders could all rely on, every day. With inconsistent CAD files spanning decades and vendors, the challenge wasn't just technical. It was operational.

geoConvergence shares how an operations-first approach, rigorous field validation, and a multi-stakeholder design philosophy helped BCPS digitize 5 million square feet — and build an Indoor GIS program built to last.

School safety mapping is no longer a future goal, it’s a present necessity. When emergencies happen, accurate indoor maps and real-time location data can mean the difference between confusion and coordinated response, between delay and decisive action.

The technology exists. The expertise exists. What’s needed now is broader adoption, sustainable funding, and cross-department collaboration to ensure schools have reliable, up-to-date floor plans that first responders can trust.

Attending key conferences can deepen your GIS expertise, spark new ideas, connect you with peers, and grow your professional support system.

Here are the top GIS conferences that support digitally transforming campus operations using ArcGIS.

By standardizing CAD data and implementing ArcGIS Indoors through ArcGIS Online, Baylor unified scattered PDFs, drawings, and institutional knowledge into a governed indoor GIS that supports facilities operations, space analytics, and decision-making across campus. In collaboration with Dunaway, the university moved from static floor plans to actionable insights—proving that indoor GIS isn’t just about maps, but about making space work smarter.