codefordc/school-modernization

Looking at fifteen years of school modernization funds

School Modernization Spending in the DCPS

Lets look at the distribution of modernization funds for the last fifteen years.

CONTEXT: DCPS has been executing a roughly 15 year, facilities modernization project for DCPS schools (not charter schools) and has spent roughly $5B on upgrades.

PROBLEM: While data on how funds have been spent is available (please see spreadsheet below), it's unclear how the money has been spent and there are questions as to how funds and upgrades have been equitably distributed.

PROPOSED SOLUTION: To create a website with data visualization features that shows how money is currently being spent, on what schools and in what neighborhoods and shows features that communicate future need for improving facilities in the long term. It is the hope of volunteers that the website will be able to persuade council members to distribute funds in an equitable manner.

TIMELINE: Site to go live by February in time for public hearings in March. With a February timeline, we can aim for a public roll out to specific stake holders, elected officials, community members and possibly media.

Potential Features -heat map of what has been spent -stream graph

Resources

• Team Slack -- Come hang out. just request access via the code for dc site

• At Risk Funds Distrbutions Visualization -- A look at how DCPS distributes funding for the support of at risk students by schools in the district by @cmgiven.

• Per Student Funding Changes Visualiztion -- A look at how funding is changing for schools between FY 2015 and FY 2016 by @cmgiven.

• Public Education Master Facilities Plan -- contains several map based visualizations of 'apolitical' needs based facilities gaps.

• Student Assignment Policies and DCPS School boundaries -- contains breakdown of feeder patterns for current districts in the DCPS system.

Data

Data sources includes DC Public Schools (DCPS), DC Public Charter School Board (PCSB), Office of the State of Superintendent of Education (OSSE), and Office of the Chief Financial Officer (OCFO). Data sources can be found in the input data folder.

The final datasets can be found in the output data folder, including a data dictionary.

school-modernization's Issues

preliminary designs

Charter school levels

For DCPS data the school level ('elementary', 'middle', etc) is straight forward. The PCS schools don't always fit into those categories. How should they be classified?

new elem #1

in this spreadsheet:
https://github.com/codefordc/school-modernization/blob/master/InputData/Base%20spending%20data%20and%20GSF%2021CSF.csv

one of the schools is named "New Elem #1" - what school is this?

DCPS max occupancy

DCPS has a total capacity permanent, total capacity portable and a sum of both. Should we include or exclude the portable capacity?
I could not find an applicable portable capacity for PCS.
For now I have assumed total capacity permanent only.

charter school data

-the charter school data didn't match up well with any of the geojson files for location so currently using code for DC school datafile from 13-14. need to confirm addresses haven't changed, fill in for new schools. alternatively build better name matching to current opendatadc geojsons

Vision for project

In this thread, we are looking to determine vision and scope of the project which was brought to us from 21st Century Schools.

CONTEXT: DCPS has been executing a roughly 15 year, facilities modernization project for DCPS schools (not charter schools) and has spent roughly $9B on upgrades.

PROBLEM: While data on how funds have been spent is available (please see spreadsheet below), it's unclear how the money has been spent and there are questions as to how funds and upgrades have been equitably distributed.

PROPOSED SOLUTION: To create a website with data visualization features that shows how money is currently being spent, on what schools and in what neighborhoods and shows features that communicate future need for improving facilities in the long term. It is the hope of volunteers that the website will be able to persuade council members to distribute funds in an equitable manner.

TIMELINE: Site to go live by February in time for public hearings in March. With a February timeline, we can aim for a public roll out to specific stake holders, elected officials, community members and possibly media.

Potential Features
-heat map of what has been spent
-stream graph

charter school feeds

do charter schools have a feed pattern like DC public schools?