School District Boundary Review
Program (SDRP)
Matt Reilly
NYS Education Department
mreilly@mail.nysed.gov
518-474-6541
1
School Districts as Geographic Units
• School districts are an atypical geography – except in the
cases of small and big cities and one or two villages, they’re
generally not coterminous with other municipalities in New
York state and thus
– Don’t easily aggregate and/or ‘scale up’ in the way that
other Census geographies do:
• e.g., census tract to
• municipality (village, city, town) to
• county
• Map on the next page displays this: Albany county school
districts (in light blue) and county boundaries (in gold)
– Many of those on the periphery are located in both
Albany and the surrounding counties of Greene,
Schoharie & Schenectady
2
Albany County School Districts
3
School District Boundary Review
• PL 107-110, authorizing the federal No Child left Behind (NCLB) Act
requires that states review the boundaries on record with the Census every
two years as a condition for receipt of Title I funds (the main federal support
for struggling schools characterized by high poverty)
• Underlying geography/maps revealed by this process becomes an input into
the Census estimates of poor children, which along with other factors (e.g.,
foster care and TANF eligible children) drives Title I allocations to school
districts, and schools (including charters and those that serve severely
disabled children); See:
– http://www.emsc.nysed.gov/funding/cladcep/0910/childcount0910.html
for the algorithm behind eligible child counts;
4
School District Boundary Review
• In SY 09-10, pursuant to Part A, the largest Title I fund, $1.134
billion was apportioned to counties and schools; an additional
$904 million in ARRA (the American Recovery and
Reinvestment Act – i.e., the federal stimulus) funds were
distributed to Title I eligible entities
• Over the same period, State aid to school districts has not
grown at the same rate as before (see graph in next slide) and
the Executive recommends a cut of 5%; therefore, during the
most recent two year SDRP cycled recently completed,
anecdotal evidence suggested greater interest in boundary
review so as to guarantee maximum Federal Title I funds.
5
Retrenchment in Increases in Total
Statewide State Aid for Education, after
Several Years of Significant Growth
Estimated Total Statewide Increases in School Aid (in $ Millions)
$2,000
$1,700
$1,700
$1,500
$1,100
$1,000
$830
$740
$500
$405
$0
2004-'05
2005-'06
2006-'07
2007-'08
2008-'09
2009-'10
2010-'11 *
($500)
($1,100)
($1,000)
($1,500)
School Year
* As Recommended in the
Governor's Executive Budget
6
SDRP Processing Before
• Boundary review between district and federal government was
formerly a ‘paper’ process:
– Census would mail to districts who sought to review the
boundaries on file with Census a paper map;
– If the district had changes, they would manually ‘mark up’
the map, and mail to the Census, who would make the
boundary change.
7
SDRP Processing Now
•
Now, with the most recent cycle just completed in the fall of 2009, the process is
electronic:
– Census provides PDFs of school district boundary maps and also posts them at a
website which overlays district boundaries with: other geographies, highways, parks,
bodies of water and other landmarks, to aid in boundary identification;
– If a district requires a change, they notify SED staff, who makes the change using a
custom GIS software product created for this purpose;
– SED then uploads the new shapefiles of changed boundaries to the Census, who
incorporates these into their geographic files;
•
Between 20 and 25 or 3 to 4 percent of the State’s 676 districts made boundary changes
(in each case, they were small changes of marginal value) in the fall of 2009
•
Nevertheless, we have reason to believe that this recent interest by school districts in
getting their federal Census boundaries correct may be an outlier, driven by the slow
recovery and the desire to maximize federal funds at a time of declining State aid to
education.
8
Factors Mitigating Against Greater School District
Interest in Decennial Census Data
• Districts have information on pupil demography that are
strategic data elements for their operations and which are
surrogates/correlates of Census data:
– Free and reduced lunch counts, English language learners,
students with disabilities, race/ethnicity, etc., which are
correlates of poor achievement and which drive up
education spending are collected annually;
– Other data points, which are proxies for low SES and
family dislocation/stress, such as student stability (i.e., the
percentage of students residing in the district in yr. 1
remaining in the district at yr. 2) are also collected annually
by SED.
9
Factors Mitigating Against Greater School District
Interest in Boundary Review
•
On balance there is not a desire or feeling that “we need to capture or find more kids”:
–
•
Federal funding in total is just about 5% of K-12 funding in an average year (i.e., one in
which there was no ARRA) Statewide –
–
•
Title 1 is not threshold based – that is, reaching the 50K, 100k or 200K threshold is not essential in
terms of federal funding the way it might be in economic development or other policy areas
Thus not as cost-beneficial to get their boundaries right – less in it for them
The school districts with the greatest pockets of poverty and with therefore the most to gain
from federal Title 1 allocation are in cities whose districts are coterminous with the
boundaries of the city:
– 79% of Title I Part A allocations are comprised of the following 7 cities whose
boundaries are well-known, established and coterminous with the city:
– Albany, Buffalo, the 5 boroughs of New York, Rochester, Schenectady, Syracuse and
Yonkers
» Thus for close to 80%* of the State (on a funding-weighted basis) ascertaining
whether the boundary is correct process is simple and straightforward by
‘eyeballing’ the map;
10
Factors Mitigating Against Greater SED State Role in
Boundary Review
•
Intergovernmental relationship is different:
– The State Education Department is not the executive branch in the same way as
other State agencies: our Commissioner is appointed by the Board of Regents
and not the Governor;
• As such, in areas outside of our normal, constitutional purview -- instruction,
assessment (i.e., testing), the licensing of the teaching workforce and other
professions -- we can’t or generally don’t choose to, compel district behavior;
– So we can’t tell a district what its boundaries are. Rather we tell them “this is
what the feds say the district’s geography is; you tell us if its right; otherwise
we won’t change it.”
•
Mandate relief is a significant factor in the current fiscal/economic environment
•
No a priori theory which would lead us to think that there are pockets of uncounted
kids or pockets of poverty on the periphery of a district which would cause districts
to invest the necessary resources to get the boundaries perfect – a zero sum game
11