| Title The search for the right elementary school: A look into the Elk Grove Unified School District | |||||
|
Author Teddy Atkinson American River College, Geography 350: Data Acquisition in GIS; Fall 2003 email:tmatkinson@comcast.net | |||||
|
Abstract The importance of education comes mutual to the psychological and social development of a child during their early years of academic learning. I will give a personal account of this as an example of the importance of early childhood education. In doing so bring about the major issues I believe are faced by most parents when considering the quality of their children’s education. Methods of data acquisition and manipulation will be explained, as well as the relevancy of the results and analysis of this data to the objective of creating a process (or method) for finding and evaluating an elementary school. Examples of the created method will be made available through hyperlinks, which will be relevant to my own personal search and evaluation of my oldest son’s school. Conclusive results of my personal search and evaluation will also be given. | |||||
|
Introduction The importance of education cannot be stressed enough or summed up easily. Between the ages of three to five years, children begin to exercise a curiosity of the world. If given the opportunity, this curiousity may cause them to “develop a sense of initiative” (Smith 121). From this curiousity, “a child’s life expands into school experiences and a widening range of peer relationships” (Smith 121). I remember as a child how unimportant school was to me, but now as a parent, I find myself worried about my children’s education. The issues concerning a child’s early education is a serious one that I believe all parents can relate to. There are many questions and concerns involved when sending a child off to attend a school that is new to both child and parent. Some questions a parent may ask can be: Do my children have alternate schools they may attend? What is the quality of the school and its faculty? How crowded is the school? Is the school culturally diverse? Would this school be a comfortable learning and social environment for my child? I faced these questions myself when I gained custody of my oldest son in the middle of his kindergarten year. After relocating three times within the first few months of his school year, he came to live with me in Sacramento to attend Raymond Case Elementary; one of many overcrowded schools in the Elk Grove Unified School District. After a few weeks the school informed me to that they were offloading him to another school that had a vacancy. This school was not as close as the three other elementary schools within the area. I was unhappy to learn he would be attending a school over 5.5 miles away when there were a total of 4 schools nearby within 2.5 miles or less. Since this school was to be his 4th, was far away from home, and lacked in racial diversity, I felt this would have a high impact on his social life and learning. The location of the school would also stress my wife and me out because our tight daily schedule did not comfortably allow for an extra 20-30 minutes of driving. Days later he was allowed to go back to his home school of Raymond Case Elementary. This shuffling around between schools made me furious. My son came to live with me because he had already changed schools 3 times, which was causing a negative impact on his learning and social skills, as well as his overall education. I argued my point to both schools. I was given the option of returning him to Raymond Case and moving him to his 3rd class in the Elk Grove Unified School District (6th overall), or request that he stay at Feickert Elementary, where my son didn’t seem socially comfortable. What would be the best decision? Which school would my son best benefit from? I fought to get his previous teacher from Raymond Case Elementary since she was a very good and experienced teacher. Raymond Case said that this was not possible, he would be put into a different class, but at least this would be the class he stays with. After moving my son to Sacramento to better his living situation (school, friends, family, upbringing, etc.), I could not help but think that he was loosing out no matter what my decision would be. It would be best for him to have friends that were racially diverse(he comes from many different backgrounds), and these friends should be common inside and outside of school (meaning he would have to live near the school). I also wondered if his new teacher at Raymond Case was as good as the last one he had there or, was his teacher at Feickert, who utilized computers in her classrooms, the better decision? There was also the fact that sometime in the future I would be moving into a house of my own. Would this mean changing schools again? My son’s dilemma and the questions we faced are ones that I believe many parents face as well. Using information from the Internet and from a GIS I created, I plan to make it easier to help answer the aforementioned questions regarding a parent’s concerns about elementary schools(specifically in the Elk Grove Unified School District, using my son's case as an example). This paper will explore the questions mentioned and provide tools to help answer the questions many parents with children in elementary school may have. During the course of this project I plan to use my own personal search and evaluation on elementary schools as an example of my created methods. The conclusions of my evaluation will be presented in relation to my project conclusions and analysis. | |||||
|
Background The quest to evaluate schools within the EGUSD stemmed from my concerns as a parent about the academic and social welfare of my son thus, the importance of knowing your child’s school or potential school brings a touch of psychology into play. A brief look into psychology shows that a child’s early years of learning can have a direct effect on their growth, such as explained by Ronald E. Smith in his book, Psychology. GIS data was helpful in my goals to help evaluate elementary schools in the Elk Grove Unified School District. Shape files such as; statewide county boundaries, school districts and boundaries, schools, and streets were made available from the Department of Transportation’s Headquarters, Transportation Systems Information-GIS division. The street shape file was provided to Caltrans by Geographic Data Technologies (GDT). Samples of all data acquired are available to the public at the Department of Transportation's GIS Data Library website. The actual data is limited to a public access within the Department of Transportation. Greatschools.net provided a wide range of information on California elementary schools. This information includes; school lists, testing/academic information, demographics, faculty information, and more. The academic information was provided to Greatschools.net by the California Department of Education. This information consists of the Academic Performance Index (API), which is a summary of scores from a series of tests provided by California's Standardized Testing and Reporting (STAR) program. The Elk Grove Unified School District (EGUSD) provided an up to date lists of schools, as well as; locations, contacts, daycare information, uniform policy, briefing on school history, and links to each school’s website. EGUSD also provided a map of boundaries for elementary schools. MAP OF ELEMENTARY SCHOOL BOUNDARIES by EGUSD
| |||||
| |||||
|
Methods Taking into consideration the questions and concerns parents may have about elementary schools, I proceeded formulated a one-sentence summary of the problem: In order for a parent to make a personal evaluation of an elementary school (in this case, within the Elk Grove Unified School District), he or she must have easily accessible authoritative data that is comprehensive in the subject areas of; overcrowding (or students per teacher), quality of the faculty, overall academic rating of students (test scores), demographics, locations, and technology used. Once the topic and problem were created, a possible solution was the next logical step but a solution could not be conceived without knowing if I had good data. At this point I had narrowed the boundaries of the topic to the elementary schools within the Elk Grove Unified School District, not just schools in general. I believed the easiest place to find information would be the Internet. However, with the Internet being as vast as it is, I took an approach that would help me narrow down and limit my Internet search time. I collected data from the Transportation Systems Information division of California’s Department of Transportation Headquarters in Sacramento. As a student assistant at Caltrans, I was able to gather reliable information from the GIS unit’s data library. I collected statewide GIS related information on all schools, school district boundaries, county boundaries and Sacramento County GDT (Geographic Data Technology) street data. After aggregating the data into ArcMap 8.3, I edited the schools and school districts’ geodatabases to contain data relevant only to the Elk Grove Unified School District. I then checked for data integrity by going through the altered schools geodatabase and querying for my son’s school, which was fairly new. The query came up empty, meaning that the geodatabase needed to be updated due to the rapidly expanding school district. This gave me the key to my Internet research. I started my Internet search by using the Yahoo! Search Engine to search for my son’s school, Raymond Case Elementary. By typing in the name of the school, I received 50,900 hits. To my luck, the second and third listings were all I needed. I decided to use the EGUSD official website and Greatschools.net as authoritative references. Between the two websites and the schools geodatabase, I had three lists of elementary schools for the Elk Grove Unified School District. A comparison of the three showed 6 new schools needed to be added to the geodatabase. My first approach to adding these new schools would have been to geocode the addresses which I recieved by visiting the EGUSD website. But, due to the old street data from GDT (2000), not all new schools had a street or address to geocode to in ArcMap. The alternative was to locate them using Mapquest, then using a Garmin 12XL GPS unit, I collected Latitude and Longitude coordinates, which were then put into a comma-delimited text file and inserted into the ArcMap mxd. The completed ArcMap project would be used in conjunction with the EGUSD map of Elementary School Boundaries to help locate schools within a person’s area. EGUSD SCHOOLS
(GIS MAP) | |||||
| |||||
|
Conclusive Results and Analysis The EGUSD Schools map (GIS created map) I created was altered to show the 3 different classes of schools. The purple points were extracted from the existing geodatabase and reinserted to represent the alternative schools (special education, charter schools, etc.). The red points show the newer schools that have been added to the geodatabase, and the yellow points represent the schools from the existing geodatabase.
In order to display both the GIS map I created and the school boundaries map together, a transparency of the school boundaries was placed over a print out of the GIS map. The reason for this being my inability to take the elementary school boundaries jpg image, and make it into a functional layer in the GIS map. When I was actually successful in incorporating this image into the layers, it turned out the grid scales did not match, and the school boundaries jpg only showed as a dot. The idea of being able to use the elementary school boundaries map with the GIS map was for referencing the location of a person’s street address to surrounding schools and their borders. Since the image could not be used this way in the GIS map, the alternative was to still use the GIS map in ArcMap to reference home addresses to school locations and then use the EGUSD elementary school boundaries map separately to compare the surrounding schools to boundaries. By using the latter method (if it worked), or by using the current resulting method, a person could then create a list of schools to lookup and research using the EGUSD website and/or the Greatschools.net website, and thus giving the basis to effectively help a parent evaluate a school based on outside authoritative data. GIS MAP with ELEMENTARY SCHOOL BOUNDARIES TRANSPARANCY OVERLAY
|
 |
||||
|
Conclusive Results of Personal Research and Evaluation Using the Created Method Below is a table to show what the results of researching schools through the given websties could bring. I used the GIS map in ArcView 8.3 to do a personal school search, which resulted in a list of schools in my residential area. The list of schools I produced contains 5 schools, which includes my son's school (Raymond Case) as well as the school he was offloaded to for a short time (Feickert). The table below contains links to URLs used in my personal research and analysis. Click on a school name to sample either the EGUSD's elementary school directory website, or the schools actual website (if available). After each school name is a sample link to each of Greatschool.net's categories of information. | |||||
| Clicking through all these URLs could be tedious when trying to directly compare one or more schools to another. Greatschools.net provides an excellent function that allows you to look at an informative summary of the information provided in the links from the table above. The function produces a list of schools you select and puts them into 5 categories to be viewed and compared. The comparison is quick and comprehensive, but is strictly statistical and not as in-depth on the subjects as the regular school profiles (sampled in the above table). Below is a table with links to the 5 categories of comparisons provided by Greatschools.net as another sample of the results of my personal research and analysis. | |||||
| |||||
| My analysis and evaluations brought me to conclude that Raymond Case Elementary is the right school for my son. The school's overall rating is well balanced when considering the criteria I set earlier in the paper (teachers per student, quality of faculty, test scores, demographics, location, and technology). 100% of Raymond Case’s teachers have full credentials, with no interns or teachers that have been brought in under an Emergency Credential Waiver. The average teaching experience is 9 years, which is below the state average of 13 years. However, this may reflect the balance of young innovative teachers and older experienced teachers, which I have observed first hand. This balance is said by Greatschools.net to be an effective combination. The Growth Academic Performance Index (API) reflects this effective combination with an overall above test score performance ranking of 8 out of 10, as well as the API growth of 819 (up 36 points since 2002). The CAT/6 Reading and Math scores proved this as well. 55% of the students scored at or above the state average in reading, and 68% of the students scored at or above the state average in math. I have met some of the faculty (with various years of experience) and am personally impressed and find the teachers to be excellent. When comparing the Growth API (goal for all schools is 800) to the four other schools on my list, Raymond Case Elementary came in second, and under the API improvement from 2002 to 2003 it ranked number 1. The average class size for grades K-3 is 19 (equal to state average), and for grades 4-6 the average class size is 34 (over the state average of 29). These numbers bring the students per teacher average to 20.1 (state average 20.9). I find these statistics satisfactory since the API scores are well. With the exception of Feickert, I found all schools to be fairly well balanced in ethnicity. Feickert happened to be the school my son was relocated to, and although it does have a variety of students with different racial backgrounds, it seems to be less diverse than the other 4 schools in my area (Feickert is actually not in my area). Feickert’s students are 57% caucasian with the second largest group being Hispanic (only 14%). The 4 other schools that surround my house are fairly close in percentages, the majority of course are caucasian, but the other races follow close behind (the number of students in various minority groups vary depending on the neighborhood). Out of the 5 schools, Raymond Case tied for last place with Isabelle Jackson as far as technology. Both schools have 1 computer for every 12 students (almost double the state average of 6.9). Lastly, out of the 5 schools, Raymond Case is the closest, and it’s route lies along a fairly low traffic area. The next closest schools were Isabelle Jackson and Mary Tsukamoto, both approximately 1.7 miles away and most of that is in low traffic residential areas. Anna Kirchgater was 2.5 miles away, with the quickest route along 2 high traffic roads with several stoplights. Feickert was the farthest (5.5miles) and for the quickest travel time required use of the Highway 99, as well as other high traffic roads. If I were to move, it would be within the same area, but most likely would cause a change in elementary school boundaries, and in turn a change in schools. If this were the case (although unlikely), I would choose a house near Mary Tsukamoto Elementary (scores were similar to Raymond Case’s, with teachers having an average 13 years of experience), or possibly Isabelle Jackson Elementary (scores were not favorable compared to that of Raymond Case, but Anna Kirchgater being the next closest school had the worst scores). I found this research to be highly intriguing and exciting. I believe my developed process of searching for, and evaluating, an elementary school to be considerably effective. The use of ArcView 8.3 and the GIS map I created was very useful, but isn’t absolutely necessary in the process of locating and evaluating a school. Anyone within the Elk Grove Unified School District can effectively use the EGUSD website along with Greatschools.net to help make a thorough decision about a school, however, different methods for locating a school within a certain area or near a specific residence will be needed without the use of ArcView and the GIS map. | |||||
|
References Elk Grove Unified School District. 20 Sep 2003. “Elk Grove Unified Schools.” Your Online Guide to K-12 Schools. 2003 Greatschools Inc. 20 Sep. 2003. Smith, Ronald E. Psychology. St. Paul: West Publishing Company, 1993 | |||||
Data Sources California Schools: California Department of Transportation. 10 Sep. 2003 K-12 School Districts and Boundaries: California Department of Transportation. 10 Sep. 2003 New Schools: Garmin 12XL GPS Unit operated by Teddy Atkinson Sacramento County Boundary: California Department of Transportation. 10 Sep. 2003 Sacramento County Streets: California Department of Transportation. 10 Sep. 2003 | |||||