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House Education reviews state district-mapping tools; staff to publish committee draft maps
Summary
John Adams of the Center for Geographic Information demonstrated the district builder, School Explorer and drive-time mapper to the House Education committee, addressing CSV/shareable-link workflows, Facilities Condition Index reports and options to publish draft maps for public review.
The House Education committee received a tutorial on Feb. 10 for three state mapping tools designed to help draft and evaluate school districts, with staff agreeing to publish committee draft maps to the School Explorer for broader review.
John Adams, director at the Center for Geographic Information in the Agency of Digital Services, walked members through the district builder, the School Explorer and a drive-time mapper hosted at map.vermont.gov/education. "This is all, custom built open source technology," Adams said, noting the tools are open-source, publicly available and intended to make district configurations and related metrics transparent.
The district builder lets users assemble districts from Vermont towns and aggregates student resident ADM (average daily membership) at the town level in real time as towns are assigned. Adams demonstrated export and save options, saying the most robust backup is the CSV "assignments" file, and warned that the application's "copy shareable link" function creates a snapshot that must be regenerated after edits.
Committee members reported practical issues while saving and reloading work: a member said exporting produced a file that opened in Excel and would not re-import. Adams suggested the CSV may have been inadvertently saved as an Excel (.xlsx) file and offered to troubleshoot and confirmed he could load a CSV provided to him.
Adams also showed the report generator, which produces charts and district profiles including the Facilities Condition Index (FCI) breakdown by school and district; he demonstrated where to hover for school-level FCI details and how to export tables for Excel. The School Explorer, he said, supports multiple layers and a recently added "school flows" layer obtained from the Agency of Education that shows town-to-school student flows when three or more students from a town attend a school. Adams emphasized the flows use a modeled 9-1-1 address dataset rather than actual student residences.
Representative Dobich asked whether the apps could be combined into a single "parent" tool to allow users to overlay feeding patterns and other layers without switching apps. Adams said linking the apps so they feel seamless would be feasible but full in-app overlay across the builder and explorer could be limited by user-experience and technical back-end differences. "We could look into finding a way to ... export and upload your proposal there," he said, describing practical workarounds such as publishing named draft maps in the Explorer.
The committee agreed it would be useful to publish committee draft maps so members and the public can overlay other layers and review configurations. Adams said the team can add multiple named drafts to the School Explorer and that once drafts are posted they will be publicly accessible. The chair thanked Adams for the demonstration: "They're fabulous," the chair said, and recessed the meeting for five minutes.
What happens next: committee staff and members will provide draft map files to the Center for Geographic Information for upload to the School Explorer, where they can be toggled and overlaid with available layers for committee review and public access.
