Project Balance
Before | Uneven distribution of students caused unbalanced class sizes
After | Class sizes balanced by assigning students to their closest schools
A three-elementary school district in the Philadelphia suburbs consistently experienced variable class sizes and did not want to redistrict.
Their schools were equal in size with the same number of general education classrooms.
The driving distances between the student addresses and elementary schools were calculated, and we found the closest and second-closest school for each address. We discovered that we could almost perfectly balance the class sizes simply by sending more students to their closest schools. The remaining new student assignments were “tweaked” based on proximity to students attending neighboring schools and existing school bus stops.