DRMP’s staff served the Santa Rosa County School District’s Administrative Services Department to assist in the areas of school planning, transportation, and development review. Tasks include mapping student addresses, creating geodatabases with school capacity and enrollment information, and creating a transportation model for the District.

The DRMP team utilized Esri’s Network Analyst to create network service areas based on County roads and calculate each student’s shortest path to their assigned school.  All elementary, middle, and high schools were examined for their distribution of students as well as the average distance travelled.  Schools close to or over allotted capacity were noted as part of this analysis. The DRMP team also used existing bus route, ridership and mileage information to work with School District staff to approximate transportation costs by school.

DRMP also modeled development potential in the County based on U.S. Census figures and permissible zoning to identify the areas in the County that are predicted to see continued population growth and residential housing infill.  Common areas, developed lands, and uses not compatible with residential housing (i.e. state forest, U.S. military, other zone types) were not included in the calculations. Possible development was classified and spatially grouped by school attendance zone to identify the school with the largest potential for future overcrowding. Our team was able to create multiple iterative scenarios with District staff to investigate transportation scenarios to remediate schools over capacity.

Using advanced spatial analysis to view land use, school, student, and transportation data on a single platform allowed our team to estimate transportations costs and recommend potential solutions to the Santa Rosa School District to deal with school capacity and transportation issues.