Analysis of Walk Distance for Elementary School Students

The West Contra Costa Unified School District (WCCUSD) serves approximately 30,830 students, who attend 38 elementary schools, 7 middle schools, 6 comprehensive high schools, and 10 alternative schools. WCCUSD uses GIS to determine how far elementary students have to walk to their schools. Walk distances are computed annually to see patterns of residency and when attendance boundaries change due to school closures.

Datasets used for this project were obtained from several sources. WCCUSD datasets included school attendance areas (polygons), schools (points), and K-6 grade students (points). Contra datasets included streets (lines) and waterbodies (polygons). ESRI’s shaded relief layer was also used in final map products.

Network Analyst was needed to calculate walk distances. Network Analyst is an ArcGIS extension which can determine the best route between locations, the closest facilities to a given location, the service area surrounding a location, and the cost of travel between numerous locations. In order to determine walk distances, polygons surrounding each school at various distances needed to be calculated. Using Network Analysts’ New Service Area option, each school was added as a ‘Facility’ and the service area properties were set to feet away from facility at various intervals. This produced 144 polygons or ‘Service Areas’ based on streets surrounding school, which specified a range in feet away from school locations. Specifically, 4 polygons (rings) around each school were created for the following distances: 0 to less than ¼ mile, ¼ mile to ½ mile, ½ mile to ¾ mile, and ¾ mile to less than 1 mile.

The next step was to determine how many students live in each ‘Service Area.’ In ArcMap, the ‘Select by Location’ feature was used to determine how many students of a particular school resided in the selected service area. This process was repeated for each school and service area. For example, it was determined that 94 resident students live less than ¼ mile from Bayview Elementary, as compared to 350 resident students who live less than ¼ mile from Dover Elementary.>

The final outcomes of the project included tables and maps. The tables displayed the number and percentage of K-6 resident students by school and cumulative walk distance. The maps displayed walk distance areas surrounding each school in relation to the school’s boundary. The results showed that there is a wide variety in the number of students who reside close to their resident school. Schools located in less populated areas with larger attendance areas had less than 5% of their resident students living within less than ¼ mile. However, schools in densely populated areas with smaller attendance areas had over 50% of their resident students living within less than ¼ mile.

This walk distance analysis will be used as baseline data to inform the school closure and redistricting processes. It is important that changes to existing attendance areas do not increase the walking distances of elementary school students.

By Nicole Joyner