Site selection for a New School with ArcGIS Online?

[AASTGIS]

Hello all,

I have a small high school GIS course I am in charge of and I am looking for some relevant projects for students to engage with.  

We are a fast growing county and our schools are bursting at the seams.  I thought it would be interesting to see if we could find a data-informed location for a new high school in our county using ArcGIS Online.  

Does anyone out there have any ideas about the best way to go about this?  I would need to create step by step directions as the students and I are both newbies.  What data would be useful?  What analysis tools would we need to employ?  What questions should we ask?

Anybody out there do anything related to this that have some ideas and/or help?

Thanks!

Evan Sellers

Academy for the Arts, Science, and Technology
Myrtle Beach, SC

[BrianBaldwin]

@JaredNelson - Do you have any thoughts on this one? 

Jared works with Davis Demographics - who basically do this type of analysis full-time for districts - but I was curious to see what his thoughts were on data or ways that this type of project could be tackled by students.

@AASTGIS - The other thing that you could look at, is ArcGIS Business Analyst - which provides a lot of tools, data, and functionality for exactly this type of workflow. I would think that this would be a pretty good path to explore. There are also a couple different resources and lessons to help you get started.

This path: https://learn.arcgis.com/en/paths/try-arcgis-business-analyst-web-app/, has a bunch of different lessons (none related specifically to a school), but the fundamentals will translate over.

[AASTGIS]

Thank you.  I will look into using ArcGIS Business Analyst.  I figure we could pull together info data and info to provide a very basic idea of where a new school might need to go.  I plan to reach out to our district folks and see if they can provide some info as well.  

Thanks again!

[JaredNelson]

Hi Brian, thanks for tagging me here. 

@AASTGIS Hi Evan, Davis Demographics does this very analysis for school districts across the country and we have tools for this. We use the district's data such as current students, historical students, boundaries, schools, housing developments, and historical growth.

If you would like to have a call to discuss the process or just share ideas please let me know.

Jared Nelson
https://www.linkedin.com/in/jared-nelson-978b89116/