FLORIDA GEOGRAPHIC DATA LIBRARY DOCUMENTATION

TITLE: SCHOOL ATTENDANCE BOUNDARIES IN FLORIDA 2013 - 2014

Geodataset Name:       NCES_SABS_2014
Geodataset Type:       SHAPEFILE
Geodataset Feature:    Polygon
Feature Count:         2775
GENERAL DESCRIPTION:
This layer contains school attendance boundaries in Florida for the 2013-14 school year from the School Attendance Boundaries Survey (SABS). SABS is a voluntary survey conducted biennially by the U.S. Department of Education's (ED) National Center for Education Statistics (NCES). These data were collected and processed as part of the School Attendance Boundary Survey (SABS) project which was funded by NCES to create geography delineating school attendance boundaries. Original source information that was used to create these boundary files were collected over a web-based self-reporting system, through e-mail, and mailed paper maps. The web application provided instructions and assistance to users via a user guide, a frequently asked questions document, and instructional videos. Boundaries supplied outside of the online reporting system typically fell into one of six categories: a digital geographic file, such as a shapefile or KML file; digital image files, such as jpegs and pdfs; narrative descriptions; an interactive web map; Excel or pdf address lists; and paper maps. 2013 TIGER/line features (that consist of streets, hydrography, railways, etc.) were used to digitize school attendance boundaries and was the primary source of information used to digitize analog information. This practice works well as most school attendance boundaries align with streets, railways, water bodies and similar line features included in the 2013 TIGER/line "edges" files. In those few cases in which a portion of a school attendance boundary serves both sides of a street, contractor staff used Esri s Imagery base map to estimate the property lines of parcels. The data digitized from analog maps and verbal descriptions do not conform to cadastral data (and many of the original GIS files created by school districts do not conform with cadastral or parcel data). The following Florida school districts did not participate in the 2013-2014 School Attendance Boundary Survey, and therefore are not represented in this dataset: Bradford, Calhoun, Clay, Dixie, Gadsden, Gilchrist, Gulf, Hendry, Jackson, Monroe, Nassau, Putnam, Suwannee. For further information, visit: http://nces.ed.gov/programs/sabs/.
DATA SOURCE(S):                    National Center for Education Statistics (NCES)
SCALE OF ORIGINAL SOURCE MAPS:     Varies
GEODATASET EXTENT:                 State of Florida
PUBLICATION DATE: 20150701 TIME PERIOD OF CONTENT: Begin Date: 20130801 End Date: 20140630 DOWNLOAD LINK: http://www.fgdl.org/metadataexplorer/explorer.jsp

FEATURE ATTRIBUTE TABLES:

Datafile Name: NCES_SABS_2014.DBF
ITEM NAME WIDTH TYPE
OBJECTID
4 OID
SRCNAME
100 String
NCESSCH
254 String
SCHNAM
254 String
LEAID
7 String
UPDATEDATE
36 Date
GSLO
2 String
GSHI
2 String
DEFACTO
3 String
STABBREV
2 String
SLEVEL
1 String
OPENENROLL
1 String
SHAPE
4 Geometry
MULTIBDY
1 String
DESCRIPT
60 String
FGDLAQDATE
36 Date
AUTOID
4 Integer
SHAPE.AREA
0 Double
SHAPE.LEN
0 Double

FEATURE ATTRIBUTE TABLES CODES AND VALUES:

Item
Item Description
OBJECTID Internal feature number.

SRCNAME School name.

NCESSCH 12 character unique national ID.

SCHNAM School name from the CCD.

LEAID Unique district national ID.

UPDATEDATE Most recent update date.

GSLO Low grade; PK through 12

GSHI High grade; KG through 12

DEFACTO District de facto status.
Yes = Yes

No = No


STABBREV State abbreviation

SLEVEL School level
1 = Low grade: PK through 03; High grade: PK through 08

2 = Low grade: 04 through 07; High grade: 04 through 11

3 = Low grade: 08 through 12; High grade: 12 only

4 = A configuration not falling within the other three categories


OPENENROLL School open enrollment status.
0 = No

1 = Yes


SHAPE Feature geometry.

MULTIBDY Identifies schools with boundaries that differ by grade.
0 = No

1 = Yes


DESCRIPT Based on SCHNAM.

FGDLAQDATE The date which FGDL acquired the data from the source.

AUTOID Unique ID added by GeoPlan

SHAPE.AREA Area in meters

SHAPE.LEN Perimeter in meters


USER NOTES:
A union was performed to align boundaries between school levels, 
but in some cases the distance between boundaries was too large 
to move without confirmation from the district. School feeder 'slivers' 
remain in these areas.

This data is provided 'as is'. GeoPlan relied on the integrity
of the original data layer's topology
The map only includes information provided by the district. Every 
effort was made to ensure that all populated areas were covered 
by school boundaries, but in some instances 'Unassigned' polygons 
cover populated Census blocks.

This data is provided 'as is' by GeoPlan and is complete to our
knowledge.

The following Florida school districts did not participate in the 2013-2014 School 
Attendance Boundary Survey, and therefore are not represented in this dataset: 
Bradford, Calhoun, Clay, Dixie, Gadsden, Gilchrist, Gulf, Hendry, Jackson, 
Monroe, Nassau, Putnam, Suwannee. See the SABS documentation for more
details: http://nces.ed.gov/programs/sabs/content/sabs/2015118.pdf
GeoPlan relied on the integrity of the attribute information within
the original data.
Suggested Citation: Phan, T., (2015). Documentation for the School 
Attendance Boundary Survey: School Year 2013-2014  (NCES 2015-118) 
U.S. Department of Education. Washington, DC: National Center for 
Education Statistics. Retrieved [date] from http://nces.ed.gov/pubsearch.

The School Attendance Boundary Survey (SABS) Geodatabase is designed to 
improve the quality and accessibility of educational geography and tabular data 
to school personnel, researchers, and policy makers. A primary goal is to integrate 
diverse spatial information delineating school attendance boundaries into a single, 
uniform, digital GIS database that will result in an original, geographically rich data 
set. Every school catchment area has a uniform data structure and a unique 
identification number that associates it with the appropriate school. This 
tandardized identifying information will allow users to analyze thousands of 
geographic features collected and distributed by NCES-saving individual 
researchers the necessity of collecting and organizing these data in a piece-meal 
fashion. By providing the public with a mapping system that contains detailed 
boundary information on all public schools across the nation, it will become 
possible for school personnel, researchers, and policy makers to examine 
relationships between schools in the same district or across the nation. Using 
this information can raise awareness of the number of students in areas hit by 
natural disasters and could aid relief and planning efforts by the Department 
of Homeland Security.

This data is provided 'as is' and its horizontal positional accuracy
has not been verified by GeoPlan

This data is provided 'as is' and its vertical positional accuracy
has not been verified by GeoPlan

The SABS dataset is intended for research purposes only and reflects
a single snapshot in time. School boundaries frequently change from
year to year. To verify legal descriptions of boundaries, users must
contact the school district directly.

The Florida Geographic Data Library is a collection of Geospatial Data
compiled by the University of Florida GeoPlan Center with support from
the Florida Department of Transportation. GIS data available in FGDL is
collected from various state, federal, and other agencies (data sources)
who are data stewards, producers, or publishers. The data available in
FGDL may not be the most current version of the data offered by the
data source. University of Florida GeoPlan Center makes no guarantees
about the currentness of the data and suggests that data users check
with the data source to see if more recent versions of the data exist.

Furthermore, the GIS data available in the FGDL are provided 'as is'.
The University of Florida GeoPlan Center makes no warranties, guaranties
or representations as to the truth, accuracy or completeness of the data
provided by the data sources. The University of Florida GeoPlan Center
makes no representations or warranties about the quality or suitability
of the materials, either expressly or implied, including but not limited
to any implied warranties of merchantability, fitness for a particular
purpose, or non-infringement. The University of Florida GeoPlan Center
shall not be liable for any damages suffered as a result of using,
modifying, contributing or distributing the materials.

A note about data scale: 

Scale is an important factor in data usage.  Certain scale datasets
are not suitable for some project, analysis, or modeling purposes.
Please be sure you are using the best available data. 

1:24000 scale datasets are recommended for projects that are at the
county level.
1:24000 data should NOT be used for high accuracy base mapping such
as property parcel boundaries.
1:100000 scale datasets are recommended for projects that are at the
multi-county or regional level.
1:125000 scale datasets are recommended for projects that are at the
regional or state level or larger.

Vector datasets with no defined scale or accuracy should be
considered suspect. Make sure you are familiar with your data
before using it for projects or analysis. Every effort has been
made to supply the user with data documentation. For additional
information, see the References section and the Data Source Contact
section of this documentation. For more information regarding
scale and accuracy, see our webpage at:
http://geoplan.ufl.edu/education.html

REFERENCES:
The National Center for Education Statistics (NCES):
http://nces.ed.gov/

School Attendance Boundary Survey (SABS):
http://nces.ed.gov/programs/sabs/

Documentation for the School Attendance Boundary Survey (SABS): School Year 2013-2014:
http://nces.ed.gov/programs/sabs/content/sabs/2015118.pdf

DATA LINEAGE SUMMARY:
Project into processing geodatabase.
Process Date: 20150105

Merge School Level Feature Classes: Merged all applicable school level feature classes, such as primary, middle, and high, into a new single feature class. Process Date: 20150112
Fuzzy Join by Level: Uses fuzzy string comparison to append a field from the Join Feature Class to the Target Feature Class. Candidates for the match are limited by a where class. Process Date: 20150119
Verify School Completeness by District: This tool uses the NCESSCH attribute to check for duplicate IDs, valid IDs, and it checks for missing schools. Process Date: 20150126
Assign, Dissolve, Append, and Join: Brings together the feature class that contains the school attribute details and updates them with their most current boundaries. The Dissolve operation is used to extract each level of school boundaries and transforms them into a multipart polygon. Next, the extracted features are merged through the Append operation. Since the Dissolve operation will remove the attributes of the data, a Join operation is performed as the last step to restore these attributes by joining the merged features with the original multipart school feature class. Process Date: 20150202
Union, Clip, Union, and Multipart to Singlepart: Unions all levels of school boundaries together, then clips them to their district boundary. The final step unions the clipped boundaries to the district boundary. Process Date: 20150209
Add Required Fields: Automatically copied attributes from fields provided by the school district into SABS schema. This tool also added and populated SrcLvel and LEAID.Unnecessary fields were deleted during this step. Process Date: 20150216
Add Boundary IDs: Calculates the BdyID field to ncessch +01, then +02 for the second boundary of the same school, +03 for the third boundary, etc. Tool will also populate: contactID- 999999 updateDate- now() stAbbrev- two character limit boundary_complete- Y/N Process Date: 20150223
Geometry Tolerance Check: Compares dissolved school boundaries with the Census School District Boundary and identifies non-identical areas greater than the default minimum tolerance of 0.001 meters. Process Date: 20150223
Spatial Check for Missing Grades: This tool uses the CCD and a single district feature class to find geographic areas that are not covered by a specific grade range. Process Date: 20150302
The following NCES process steps come from the Documentation for the School Attendance Boundary Survey (SABS): School Year 2013-2014: http://nces.ed.gov/programs/sabs/content/sabs/2015118.pdf Processing the School Boundaries: Image files (paper maps or digital) Paper maps were scanned and saved as jpg files. Digital image files, such as pdfs, were converted to jpg files using Adobe Acrobat Pro. The digital images were georeferenced using the 2013 TIGER/Line files (https://www.census.gov/geo/maps-data/data/tiger-line.html). The boundaries were then digitized using the georeferenced image. Each school was drawn as a unique feature. While most school boundaries followed the geographies captured in the TIGER/Line file, such as roads and railways, this was not always the case. In instances where the boundaries differed from TIGER/Lines, ESRI s Imagery base map was used to identify and ensure that housing units were not intersected. ESRI s World Imagery provides 0.3 meter resolution imagery in the continental United States. Geographic Information System files GIS files were projected into USA Contiguous Albers Equal Area Conic USGS and imported into a geodatabase. All processing steps were performed on the school boundaries while stored in a feature class. Boundaries drawn using online tool The online boundary collection tool, known as the School Mapper, allowed school district personnel to draw school boundaries electronically. The application was populated with the CCD school data including: the names and locations of the schools in the district, high and low grade, and school level. The School Mapper was also pre-populated with boundaries from the SY 2009-10 or SY 2010-11 collections, where applicable. In these instances, the users were asked to review each boundary and make necessary updates. Once all boundaries were drawn, the School Mapper allowed users to save, download or revise their school boundary file. The school boundary files were saved in a geodatabase. Attribute Association School boundaries submitted as shapefiles and other GIS formats were delivered with a wide variety of attributes and field names. A custom GIS tool was used to incorporate the attributes provided by the district into the SABS table schema (see Appendix A). These boundaries were then associated with attributes from the CCD using another custom GIS tool. Boundaries drawn in the School Mapper did not require the two steps described above because the school names in the application were pulled directly from the CCD. Quality Assurance Procedures for all File Types After the initial steps listed above, all of the school boundary data were processed using the following quality assurance steps. Verify School Completeness by District The purpose of this step was to identify duplicate, missing, and extra schools within the school boundary feature class as it compared to the survey universe. * Identify Duplicate Schools - Each school must be represented by a single feature in the database. Duplicate features for a single school were merged into one, thus, saving the largest extent of the duplicated records. In rare instances, a single school might maintain multiple boundaries based on grade. For example, a K-8 school might maintain one small boundary for K-6th and a second, larger boundary for 7-8. If the duplicate was a result of multiple boundaries served by the same school then the MultiBdy attribute was updated to a value of 1. The shapefile provided is the largest extent of the duplicate boundaries. The unique boundaries are available in a supplemental file upon request. * Identify Missing Schools - Each school listed in the collection universe must have a feature in the database or be determined to be out of scope for the collection universe. Analysts performed research, which included visiting the district web page and/or calling the district contact, to determine why each missing school was not included in he geodatabase. Many missing schools were open enrollment, thus the district did not deliver an attendance boundary. Valid open enrollment schools were added to the database with an attendance boundary coincident to the district boundary. The open enrollment status of each attendance boundary was recorded in the open enrollment attribute in the feature class. In instances where the missing school was an error, the correct boundary was collected from the district and incorporated into the dataset. * Identify Extra Schools - Schools that were not in the collection universe, but were reported with a boundary were saved in the database. Some magnet, charter, and other non-regular schools maintain address-based attendance boundaries. If provided by the district, these boundaries were saved in the database even though they were not required. In other cases, the file provided by the district included boundaries for closed schools. NCES confirmed the status of the school and corrected the boundaries. Spatial Check for Missing Grades This step used the CCD and a single district feature class to ensure every geographic area was covered by every grade. First, it identified geographic areas that were not covered by a specific grade. Then, analysts examined and rectified coverage in the feature class. Geometry Review and Editing School attendance boundaries were clipped to the extent of the corresponding school district boundary in order to match the SY 2013-14 SDRP collection. Respondents were encouraged to contact their SDRP representative if they determined there was an error in the district boundary. Valid unassigned areas within responding districts were covered by a feature called Unassigned. In some instances, the districts provided coverage for one school level, but not the other. In these cases, the schnam field should be combined with the sLevel field to determine which grades are missing coverage. The geometry cleanup process below not only ensured compliance with SDRP boundaries, but it also eliminated gaps and accidental overlaps. The reduction of these two errors provided cleaner data to users for geospatial analysis. * Clip to District Boundary - The school boundaries were clipped to the district boundaries to ensure that the school boundaries did not extend beyond district lines. * Union Process _ Once clipped, all school level feature classes were combined into a single feature class. The new feature class consisted of a new set of polygons that were created from the geometric union of the input features. This process automatically eliminated the gaps and overlaps in the features and ensured that the lines between school level, such as elementary and middle, coincided as they were intended. A tolerance setting of 30 feet or less was used as a parameter, which moved vertices of adjacent polygons within the tolerance to meet at a mid-point. A threshold of 30 feet was used because it is the width of a typical small street. Digitized districts and districts that delivered their data in a union were an exception to this rule. They were always processed with a tolerance setting of 0 feet. * Eliminate Slivers - The union of multiple school levels often created slivers. Slivers are geographic areas that should be coincident across grade levels, but are not. Slivers were frequently seen along freeways and rivers. For example, an elementary school boundary may follow the western edge of a river, but the overlapping middle school may follow the center of the river. It is clear that these two boundaries were intended to follow the same line so the sliver created between the central and western lines is merged with the larger boundary. SABS defined slivers as features less than 10,000 square feet. Census blocks and imagery were used to identify the appropriate steps for dealing with a sliver. Areas with residences were left as is. Slivers without residential areas, such as rivers as described in the example above, were merged with neighboring boundaries as appropriate. In some cases, features larger than 10,000 square feet were identified as slivers and merged with nearby features. This type of sliver frequently appeared as long, narrow, unassigned areas adjacent with the district boundary. *Unassigned Areas - All areas that were not covered by a school attendance area were labeled "unassigned." Airports, parks, and water bodies typically fell into this category Process Date: 20150701
..................................................................................................... GeoPlan downloaded this dataset from the National Center for Education Statistics School Attendance Boundary Survey website (http://nces.ed.gov/programs/sabs/) on May 5th, 2016. The data was downloaded in shapefile format and was in the following projection: Projected Coordinate System: USA_Contiguous_Albers_Equal_Area_Conic_USGS_version Geographic Coordinate System: GCS_North_American_1983 Next the data was reprojected to Albers NAD83 Harn and the following tasks were undertaken: - Uppercased all records in the table. - A DESCRIPT field was added based on SRCNAME - A FGDLAQDATE field was added based on date downloaded from source. - Renamed file from SABS_1314 to NCES_SABS_2014 Process Date: 20160505
MAP PROJECTION PARAMETERS:

Projection                          ALBERS
Datum                               HPGN
Units                               METERS
Spheroid                            GRS1980
1st Standard Parallel               24  0  0.000
2nd Standard Parallel               31 30  0.000
Central Meridian                   -84 00  0.000
Latitude of Projection's Origin     24  0  0.000
False Easting (meters)              400000.00000
False Northing (meters)             0.00000

DATA SOURCE CONTACT (S):

Name:
Abbr. Name:
Address:


Phone:

Web site:
E-mail:
Contact Person:
         Phone:
        E-mail:
National Center for Education Statistics
NCES
1990 K St NW
Washington, DC
20006
202-502-7431

http://nces.ed.gov/programs/sabs/ tai.phan@ed.gov Tai Phan

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Abbr. Name:             FGDL
Address:                Florida Geographic Data Library
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                        PO Box 115706
                        Gainesville, FL  32611-5706
Web site:               http://www.fgdl.org

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