Students will work in groups of three. They will create the Voronoi diagram for the three middle schools based on line-of-sight distances. Then they will create the Voronoi diagram based on the "unit square" since most of our streets within the distance are relatively perpendicular north-south and east-west streets. They will be asked to compare and contrast the two diagrams.

Students will then be asked to compare the geographically efficient attendance boundaries they generated to the actual attendance boundaries. They will be expected to consider relative school sizes and racial balance in determining if the current attendance boundaries are reasonable relative to the district's goals.

I expect this exercise to take two or three days depending on how much information I can obtain about the demographics of the school district. The first day will be used to create the Voronoi diagrams. The intent of doing both diagrams is to (a) create a successful product quickly with the line-of-sight diagram, (b) look at the situation in a more completely realistic manner with the "unit square" diagram, and (c) compare the diagrams to see if there is significant enough differences to require using the more intensive diagrams for further studies regarding our elementary schools.

The second and possibly third days will be used to look at the attendance boundaries in existence compared to the boundaries that we determine from our diagrams and consider the differences in regard to demographics and school size. We will use charts of some form (not yet determined) to summarize our results. Depending on the results we will ask from central administration for rationale regarding why students are assigned as thev are.

Pending consumation of the activity

Included in activity

See last line of "Concluding the Exploration"