There are a number of features that are offered that can represent schools and colleges in the United States. This post will help those not so familiar with the product offerings differentiate these and let you know which data products they can be found in.
First I'll go over the 3 feature types that are available in the School Boundaries Product.
The School Boundaries product contains 2 polygonal layers and a point layer. The first polygonal layer is the School District Boundaries.
School District Boundaries have a wide coverage throughout the USA. These are the administrative entities that manage budget and operations of public schools in a geographic area. The boundaries represent that area.
The second boundary type is a school attendance zone. Attendance zone serve as the geographic areas where students reside that can attend a given school within a district. In this example the High School attendance zone for Bow High School in New Hampshire actually includes the neighboring town of Dunbarton, NH. Public High School students living in both towns attend the same school.
The third and final feature type in School Boundaries is School Points. These points represent the rooftop locations of individual schools and contain a number of different attributes about the school.
Outside of the School Boundaries products there a couple of other individual boundary products that depict schools and colleges and universities.
There is a school grounds product that depicts the school property. This is more accurately described as the improved upon areas of the land parcels where the school occupies - the area where the buildings are, parking lots, green space and athletic fields. School grounds are captured whenever new school points are built and can be linked to the School Points in the school boundaries product.
Finally there are College Boundaries which depict college campus areas across the U.S. These are available in an additional stand-alone product.
You may ask, why aren't these all sold together? There tend to be different use cases for the final two feature types - they can be used as geofences for example while attendance zones and districts have particular meaning for prospective home buyers. However, all of the feature types, along with school ranking are available as part of the Education Bundle product offering.
Let me know if there are specific topics about school boundary products that I could cover in more detail in other posts and I'd be happy to do so!
John
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John Tagliaferro
Pitney Bowes
White River Junction VT
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