{"id":7592,"date":"2016-06-30T10:00:38","date_gmt":"2016-06-30T15:00:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/iowahighwayends.net\/blog\/?p=7592"},"modified":"2016-06-28T12:58:29","modified_gmt":"2016-06-28T17:58:29","slug":"map-of-iowa-school-enrollment-changes-2001-2015","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/iowahighwayends.net\/blog\/2016\/06\/map-of-iowa-school-enrollment-changes-2001-2015\/","title":{"rendered":"Map of Iowa school enrollment changes, 2001-2015"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I have created a color-coded map of Iowa that shows changes in certified enrollment between 2001-02 and 2015-16. Certified enrollment is not a <em>direct<\/em> correlation with head count, because of certain formulas, but it&#8217;s the number used for all state purposes. (The best analogy is &#8220;official attendance&#8221; vs. butts-in-seats at sporting events.) The map shows a vivid representation of rural decline:\u00a0With red, brown, and yellow showing the worst drops, it looks like a tree in October.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/iowahighwayends.net\/maps\/enrollmentchange_names.png\">Map of Iowa school district enrollment changes, 2001-15 (names)<\/a><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/iowahighwayends.net\/maps\/enrollmentchange_blank.png\">Map of Iowa school district enrollment changes, 2001-15 (outlines only)<\/a><\/p>\n<p>Nearly all the districts that gained enrollment fell into three categories: Suburbs, exurbs (within about 30 miles of a city), and meat-packing plants (Denison, Marshalltown, Storm Lake, and West Liberty). A cluster of eight in far northwest Iowa is the largest exception. The few others that showed growth: Clarinda, Fremont-Mills, Lenox, Moravia, Sioux Central, and West Monona.<em><\/em><\/p>\n<p>For districts that merged in this time frame, I added together old districts&#8217; certified enrollments from 2001-02. This is not a perfect metric, since state incentives can &#8220;add students&#8221;, but the differences are so stark I don&#8217;t think the overall results are significantly affected. For example, Exira and Elk Horn-Kimballton independently had certified enrollments over 330 in 2001, but today&#8217;s consolidated EEHK is hovering around 400. Dissolutions are factored into the remaining districts&#8217; numbers. (Russell and Corwith-Wesley are treated as mergers with Chariton and Lu Verne, respectively, given the overwhelming move of land to those districts.)<\/p>\n<p>Of Iowa&#8217;s 336 school districts in 2015, compared with certified enrollments in 2001:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>35 gained 10% or more, with Ankeny, Bondurant-Farrar, and Waukee blowing the doors off everyone else.<\/li>\n<li>37 gained up to 10%. The most neutral-enrollment district is also the state&#8217;s largest: Des Moines&#8217; certified enrollment changed by a net of 1.5, which is kind of remarkable.<\/li>\n<li>72 lost beween 0% and 10%<\/li>\n<li>85 lost between 10% and 20%<\/li>\n<li>65 lost between 20% and 30%<\/li>\n<li>42 lost 30% or more, including 33 whose boundaries never changed during this time.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>While making this map I stumbled on a couple issues relevant to graphic design I thought I&#8217;d share:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>I have six categories, so my plan was for a simple rainbow palette (the U.S. map on my &#8220;<a href=\"http:\/\/iowahighwayends.net\/blog\/2012\/08\/college-conferences\/\" target=\"_blank\">College conferences and House apportionment<\/a>&#8221; page is like this except ROYPBG instead of ROYGBP). The orange felt too close to the red for a map like this where there are a lot of lines, so I switched to a brownish hue instead.<\/li>\n<li>Because I have two positive categories and four negative categories, green is denoting a negative statistic. It&#8217;s the least worst (it&#8217;s the new &#8220;up&#8221;!) but since green connotes positive\/go\/growth, I had to think about it. I didn&#8217;t want to use a <em>USA Today<\/em>-style &#8220;shades of blue&#8221; set, and even the rainbow runs into issues of red-green colorblindness (<a href=\"http:\/\/www.cbssports.com\/nfl\/eye-on-football\/25372052\/look-bills-jets-game-has-been-complete-torture-for-color-blind-people\">as the NFL inadvertently discovered<\/a>).<\/li>\n<li>When maps and graphics were drawn before the desktop publishing era, hatch\/line\/dot patterns were used to convey different categories of information. See, for example, <a href=\"http:\/\/etc.usf.edu\/maps\/pages\/11600\/11681\/11681.htm\">this map of population growth<\/a> created in 1921. On such a busy map with detailed, crooked lines, patterns seemed to confuse more than illuminate, and &#8220;color-hatching&#8221; wasn&#8217;t an option. Solids were definitely the way to go.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I have created a color-coded map of Iowa that shows changes in certified enrollment between 2001-02 and 2015-16. Certified enrollment is not a direct correlation with head count, because of certain formulas, but it&#8217;s the number used for all state &hellip; <a href=\"http:\/\/iowahighwayends.net\/blog\/2016\/06\/map-of-iowa-school-enrollment-changes-2001-2015\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[18,7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7592","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-iowa-miscellaneous","category-schools"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/iowahighwayends.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7592","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/iowahighwayends.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/iowahighwayends.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/iowahighwayends.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/iowahighwayends.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7592"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"http:\/\/iowahighwayends.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7592\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7688,"href":"http:\/\/iowahighwayends.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7592\/revisions\/7688"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/iowahighwayends.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7592"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/iowahighwayends.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7592"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/iowahighwayends.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7592"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}