What is redistricting?
Redistricting is creating, modifying, and saving school boundaries for the purpose of assigning students to schools. Modifying school attendance boundaries to prepare for population growth, building expansion (opening, closing or moving schools), or demographic balancing is an extremely intricate undertaking. Politics and emotions can easily confuse the process and extend the time and effort necessary to complete it. 

Students generally attend a school based on their geographic proximity to it. However, many considerations beyond geography come into play for a district assigning students to each school. School capacities and class sizes, political and transportation concerns, and demographics can all affect student assignments to schools.

Transfinder^® is the solution!
The Redistricting functionality enables you to establish attendance boundary zones that can easily be manipulated to explore attendance possibilities for your district. Transfinder will empower you to visualize, analyze, and manipulate vital demographic data and the results derived from different "what-if scenarios". You can create unlimited "what-if scenarios" and then choose the best case for your plans.

Transfinder can help you project future district enrollment and visualize the effects on your current infrastructure. By enhancing your information control, Transfinder readily displays objective, quantitative data that serves as a catalyst for building a consensus among educational constituents and unite parents, students, teachers, administrators, and the community

How does Transfinder do it?
This powerful geographic information system (GIS), supersedes the traditional "paper maps, push pins and string". The pins, representing students & schools, and the string, representing attendance boundaries, are analyzed and modified so you can see the impact of changes as you make them.

The redistricting map contains color-coded (thematically distributed) students, school locations, school attendance boundaries and enrollment tallies of students enclosed in their respective school zones.  With a few clicks of your mouse, school attendance boundary lines can be repositioned and Transfinder will instantly reveal quantitative results for each "what-if" scenario.

Transfinder allows you to control the data you are working with.
You can be very specific about the students you are affecting. For example, you may not want to affect special needs or magnet school students. Furthermore, you may want demographic considerations to influence your decisions by, for example, utilizing free and reduced meal data as an index.

Transfinder will deliver the Reporting Power you need to get the job done.

• Enrollment projections reports…

• Demographic distribution reports…

• Student listing reports…

• Street and address reports…

• Transportation reports…

… are effortlessly generated to reveal current and projected results.

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This above example, a saved "what-if" scenario, reflects student enrollments by grade. Many reports are available for evaluating other factors including redistricting impacts on transportation.

Transfinder can quickly generate listings of streets and addresses for a selected enrollment zone or school boundary.

Performing redistricting with Transfinder also allows you to analyze the affects of proposed scenarios on transportation operations and costs. Once alternative scenarios have been created, you can generate various reports that will reveal the affects on routes, busloads, etc. Then you can develop "what-if" scenarios for transporting students under the new attendance plan(s). Visualizing alternatives for consolidating or adding new routes is a snap with Transfinder.

There is no doubt that redistricting is a cumbersome and time-consuming process that can be simplified by using Transfinder to eliminate many of the steps involved thereby reducing the time and effort necessary to complete the job. Harnessing this tool can affect improvements on overall political harmony for a school district, can lead to a more equitable and efficient distribution of educational services, and can save money, time, and resources for transportation.