Lehigh Valley Research Consortium: School District demo data

As a proof-of-concept demonstration, school district data covering 17 Lehigh Valley districts has been ingested into an ArcMap presentation. Since this data did not include any geometric data for the school district boundaries, these were downloaded from U.S. Census Bureau sources. The provided MS Excel format was converted to DBase IV format, including edits required to provide a unique identifier (SD_U) on a per-district basis. Other edits included modification of field titles to conform to the DBase IV format.

The original census data provided boundary outlines covering the entire state of Pennsylvania (Fig. 1), so an SQL selector was created to extract the boundaries of the Lehigh Valley region districts into a new shapefile (Fig. 2).

The extracted shapefile was then joined to the DBase IV table (using the unique key SD_U), providing access to all of the 60 or so associated fields (population, ethnicity, expenditures, etc.). For example, the following figures were generated by mapping the fields directly to the extracted shapefile.