Project 7: Estimating School-Aged Population in your New Districts

Estimating the school-aged population in each of your new school districts

Given the representativePopInSchoolDistricts and CentreCountyBGDemographics layers, the next task is to estimate how many children are in each school district, as a preliminary step before deciding where a new school would be most useful.

There are many different ways that you could tackle this task.

Some of them involve raster operations (recall the approaches used in the Texas redistricting example in Lesson 3), and the Spatial Analyst Tools - Zonal - Zonal Statistics tool. But before you can use these, you would have to construct a raster representation of the school-aged population. Again, consider how this was done in the Texas example.

A more straightforward approach will use Analysis - Summarize Within (Figure 7.11), a Spatial Join (Analysis - Spatial Join, Figure 7.11), or Analysis Tools - Overlay - Spatial Join from the Tools menu.

Figure 7.11: Commonly needed analysis tools can be accessed from the quick-start menu in the Analysis ribbon tab. Access the full list of quick-start tools by clicking the bottom arrow at the right-hand side of the icon group.

Click for a text description of the Quick Start Tools Menu image.

This image shows the quick start tools menu. It organizes commonly used tools by function. Tools to implement several of the approaches described above for estimating population can be found in this menu.

Credit: Griffin, 2019

In analysis like this, there is no 'right' or 'wrong' way, just what works, so here's the deliverable - you figure out how to get there. Do this step for both the original districts and the road-cost-weighted districts.