School District Planning

How will your school district look tomorrow?

Tools and strategies for better school planning and outcomes

With a unique and award-winning blend of land use, economic, GIS (Geographic Information Systems), and community planning experience, the Vandewalle & Associates team provides a range of services to help your public school district plan for tomorrow…and ensure that the district’s educational mission stays on course well into the future. We help districts to:

  • Track, project, and map enrollment trends
  • Select a site for a new school
  • Assess the impacts of new residential development using 26 detailed residential development types and customized enrollment ratios
  • Plan for demographic shifts
  • Forge government partnerships
  • Determine attendance boundaries

 

Tools for confident school planning

Working in partnership with the leading state agencies, university population centers, and local sources, we start each project with comprehensive and reliable data. We then add our planning expertise, our insight into market trends, and our GIS capabilities to develop the most sophisticated level of interpretation possible for your planning needs.

Picture your district’s future
We can help your district track student enrollment trends and make projections, analyze and map various build-out scenarios, delineate neighborhoods, and redefine attendance boundaries.

Prepare for the impact
We can help your district assess the impact of proposed new housing development on district revenue, school building capacities, and other district functions, both in the short term and the long term.

Plan for demographic shifts
Whether it’s population growth or decline, you can be ready with knowledge and tools for wise decisions. We can provide customized school demographic information and mapping, develop a GIS database to use with GIS mapping to study land use and demographics, or study student generation trends and their impacts on enrollment. We can factor into this analysis changing age cohorts, ethnicity, race, income, and mobility.

Find the right school site
Find the optimum location for a new school—or examine possible school closings and consolidations—by studying populations, neighborhood turnover, growth areas, walking distances, and other features affecting attendance boundaries.

Coordinate with local government
Imagine coordinating your district’s planning efforts with your community’s neighborhood or comprehensive plan. We can help organize workshops, open house forums, and public meetings. We also provide presentations and training sessions to help school board members become more proactive and involved with the local government planning processes within the district.

 

Vandewalle & Associates school projects & experience

 

Related experience

We author many comprehensive and neighborhood plans integrating important issues that affect school planning. Vandewalle & Associates can:

  • Identify future school sites based on projected enrollment growth and planned development
  • Help school districts and communities partner on school, recreation and open space facilities, by conducting interviews and workshops
  • Involve students in community planning by holding workshops and class presentations
  • Work with private residential developers to determine a logical school site in a planned neighborhood