| Where Does Our Money Go? | Following the Trail of Measure J Funding in the San Juan Unified School District
| Author Cathryn Hansen American River College, Geography 26: Data Acquisition in GIS; Fall 2008 hansencs@imail.losrios.edu
| Abstract How can we as citizens evaluate the use of public monies? This question took me through the process of analyzing how the money allocated was being spent by a local school district bond measure. My project focused on high school construction expenditures from 2003 to 2008. GIS is a perfect platform to analyze the data and present it in a geographic context. Data was gathered from the Planning and Facility Departments and the US Census Bureau and analyzed in ArcMap. The resulting map illustrates a comparison between the money spent at each high school site and the age of the school buildings. My hypothesis was that older school buildings would need the most work and, therefore, more construction money would be spent on them.
| Introduction My goal for this project was to look a little deeper into the San Juan Unified School District Measure J construction bond allocation process and see where some of the money has been spent and what were the results. I was curious about the construction: where was the money coming from, how much was being spent and what were we getting? My interest comes as a parent, school district employee and as a taxpayer. Using GIS methods to analyze the data should help illustrate the allocation and use of funds. We, as citizens, are called upon to vote for or against school construction bonds almost every year, but we do not always see the results of their passage. My goal was to gather the information and to visualize it within a GIS. I expected my map to illustrate the answers to these questions. I tried to keep in mind the advice that "cartographers should make maps based on how people who view the maps perceive and think about the maps, and about the world." (Montello & Gray) Maps designed to explain complex societal issues can be difficult to understand so one of my goals was to be clear and simple with my map.
| Background Five years ago, the voters in the San Juan Unified School District in Sacramento County passed a bond, Measure J, to fund capital improvements in the district. This is the text of the bond measure: "MEASURE J: To complete the repair/renovation in Carmichael, Orangevale, Citrus Heights, Arden-Arcade, Gold River, and Fair Oaks by building permanent classrooms to replace leaky, moldy, portable classrooms and by replacing failing plumbing, sewer and heating/air conditioning systems, shall the San Juan Unified School District issue $350,000,000 in bonds qualifying local schools for state matching funds, and appoint a citizens oversight committee and independent auditor to guarantee funds are spent only on school improvements."A committee of school officials and taxpayers was chosen to allocate the funds for the projects that Measure J funds would support. These committee meetings were public and all meeting minutes and reports are available online at www.sanjuan.edu. The first funds were allocated in 2003 and construction projects began, mostly in the summer when most students are not in school. Every summer, people driving past certain schools have seen the orange plastic fences and the construction equipment. Many of us have been curious about what is happening at the schools and how much money was being spent on each school. Generally the projects are completed, the students return and the public doesn't hear what improvements were made. Upgrading bathrooms and replacing heating units are not very interesting topics for local media.
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Methods To gather the data needed to complete this project, I contacted the Planning and Facilities Department at San Juan Unified School District. Currently there is not a GIS technician in the Planning Department but the Planning Director was very helpful in sharing a recent geodatabase that was created for them by a private contractor. It had some of the shapefiles that I needed: school sites with year built and road network. I created the map project in ArcMap 9.3 with these files and added the district shape file from the US Census Bureau along with water features.  Since there was no shape file for the high schools attendance boundaries, I downloaded a JPEG from the District website and georeferenced it to the district map from the Census Bureau. I made the district map layer transparent enough to see the boundary lines. I also had to select roads by type as the original map had too many roads showing, which made the map difficult to read.The Facilities Department provided me with the total 2003-2008 construction expenditures for the nine high schools in the District. I created a spreadsheet and added this to my project as a table. I linked this table with the schools table that came Planning and selected only the high schools to show in the map. To illustrate my two variables, constructions costs and school age, I chose graduated symbology and color coded the symbols (schoolhouses) by decades. To simplify viewing, I included the school name, year built and total construction spent as labels next to each symbol. The next challenge was setting up the legend to be simple and complete.
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| Results  Combining the year built with the construction monies completed the map illustration. I chose bright colors for the symbols so that the decade of original construction could be distinguished by color even without the labels. I chose to make these two components (age and money) very clear as this was the basis for analysis. The legend of the map is to the right and the finished map is below.
 Another result of this process took me by surprise. What started as curiosity about orange plastic fencing became an investigation which led me to write several articles for the district public e-newsletter (SJ Scene) about the construction projects and the reaction of staff, students and parents to the changes. I illustrated these articles with photos from each site and quotes from school site employees. The reaction to this series of articles has been very positive from both staff and the public. Schools have begun volunteering their own "construction stories."
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 Bella Vista High School bathroom  Rio Americano High School paving
| Analysis  The original question was "Did the oldest schools get the most money?" Looking at the map, it is clear that age of the school building did not correlate with money spent. You can see that the expenditures at the oldest school (San Juan High School) were $3,731,772 and the expenditures at the youngest school (Mesa Verde High School) were $10,357,057.
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I looked a little deeper into this and discovered that while the other schools were getting upgrades of facilities already built, the newest school (Mesa Verde High School) was lacking some major facilities that the other schools already had. Apparently when the school was built, these facilities were postponed and never got built. So now it will be getting a new gym on its campus - something that all the other high schools already had. 
In completing this project, I was very disappointed to find that the contractor did not provide metadata with the geodatabase that they compiled. Luckily, it did have projection information built-in but there was no other explanation, author or contact information. In my map project, I made sure that metadata was added through the ArcCatalog interface.Finding data for this project was not as difficult as narrowing down the amount of information I found. The scope of the project allowed me to concentrate my research on specific aspects - high schools, monies spent, age built.
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Conclusions In researching the allocation of Measure J monies, I realized that the committee is not done. Since my figures came out, $18-20 million is being proposed to upgrade San Juan High School, the oldest school in the District. This major upgrade is being made in conjunction with a major re-organization of the school into a technology magnet type of school. The Measure J committee did not just assign monies blindly; each allocation was in response to a documented need. My map showed the allocation of money this far in the process but an upgrade will need to be done as projects are completed and new ones proposed. The map illustrates the concepts without plowing through pages of reports. I learned that the process can be a complicated one and it is often difficult to wade through all the information.
| References Fairfax, Anthony E., A Step-by-Step Guide to Using Census 2000 Data. Census Channel. March 2004 Koopman, Rick, and Lex Bitner, "School District, Public Reap Benefits of GIS". ArcNews Online Winter 2007/2008. November 23, 2008. http://www.esri.com/news/arcnews/winter0708articles/springfield-illinois.html. Montello, Daniel R, and M. Violet Gray, "Miscommunicating With Isolines: Design Principles for Thematic Maps". cartographic perspective Winter 2005. November 23, 2008. http://www.geog.ucsb.edu/~montello/pubs/isoline.pdf. Myers, Don and Cynthia Jensen, Planning and Facilities Department, San Juan Unified School District. US Census Bureau, Geography Division. 2007 TIGER/Line Shapefiles for: Sacramento, California. http://www.census.gov/cgi-bin/geo/shapefiles/county-files?county=06067 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||