Georeferencing School-Age Population Projections: Methodology for a Rapidly Growing District

Schools and other public service providers often require detailed information about local populations to accommodate geographically specific population growth and decline with necessary resources. Faced with relentless middle-class population growth, the Ascension Parish School District requires fine-grained population projections of its school enrollment to ensure sufficient facilities and balanced attendance zones in coming years. In this paper we outline the method we created to integrate standard projected population values with GIS to forecast any number of sub-parish population settlement geographies. With this approach, Ascension Parish School District is able to locate future school facilities and easily negotiate multiple possible attendance zone boundaries by systematically disaggregating and recombining standard population projections through GIS.