2013-2014 School District Review Program Data Collection Plan

2013-2014 School District Review Program

The U.S. Census Bureau requests specific approval for implementation of the 2013-2014 School District Review Program (SDRP), which is covered under the generic clearance called the Geographic Partnership Programs (GPPs), OMB Control No. 0607-0795, which expires on July 31, 2015.

The National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) sponsors the SDRP, which enables the Census Bureau to create special tabulations of decennial census data by school district geography. The demographic data produced by the Census Bureau for the NCES and related to each school district is of vital importance for each state’s allocation under Title I of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act as amended by the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001. The NCES identifies a Title I Coordinator, and the Census Bureau works with the NCES on assigning a Mapping Coordinator in each state to work with the Census Bureau to implement this work. The respondents for the SDRP are the Title I Coordinators and Mapping Coordinators from the fifty (50) states, the District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico.

The SDRP invites respondent participation in two (2) phases of the program: Annotation and Verification.

As part of the 2013-2014 SDRP Annotation phase, the Mapping Coordinator in each state will receive a variety of materials from the Census Bureau to use in their review and update of school district boundaries, names, codes and geographic relationships. The Mapping Coordinators will use the Census Bureau’s MAF/TIGER Partnership Software (MTPS) and Census-supplied spatial data in digital shapefile format to identify boundary changes for their school districts.

The Census Bureau announced the 2013-2014 SDRP Annotation phase in an August 2013 letter to the respondents. The Census Bureau delivered these letters before requesting specific clearance for the 2013-2014 SDRP. The Census Bureau documented and discussed this error in procedure with OMB prior to the delivery of this clearance request. Pending approval of this request, the Census Bureau plans to ship Annotation materials to the designated state Mapping Coordinators, as well as make them available to respondents on the Census Bureau website in January 2014. The attachments to this document include examples of all the materials required to complete the Annotation phase. The Census Bureau requests that all states submit their updates by February/March 2014. To reduce the burden for the state coordinators, the Census Bureau has provided a web-based tool called TIGERweb to review their school district boundaries. The TIGERweb tool gives the state coordinators a method to communicate with their individual school districts during data collection for the SDRP. The Fiscal Year 2014 estimate of average hours per respondent for the Annotation review is 40 hours. We anticipate that 52 participants will respond. Therefore, the Fiscal Year 2014 estimate of respondent burden hours is 2,080 hours.

As part of the 2013-2014 SDRP Verification phase, Mapping Coordinators will have the opportunity to either use the MTPS with Census Bureau-supplied Verification shapefiles, or a new crowdsourcing Web Viewer tool (currently in testing) to review and verify that their boundaries were correctly captured by the Census Bureau. If a respondent finds situations where the Census Bureau did not incorporate their proposed submissions correctly, the respondent can tag and comment on the problem, and that information becomes available to the Census Bureau to make the necessary corrections.

The materials for the Verification phase will be available for respondents on the Census Bureau website in March 2014. The Verification materials have the same format and layout as the Annotation materials. The Census Bureau will send a generic notification to respondents through e-mail in March 2014 indicating that the Verification phase materials are available. Since the new crowdsourcing tool is in development, Census Bureau staff will work one-on-one with the respondents who choose to do Verification using this method to ensure their Verification is successful. The Fiscal Year 2014 estimate of average hours per respondent for the Verification review is 10 hours. We anticipate that 52 participants will respond. The Fiscal Year 2014 estimate of total respondent burden hours is 520 hours.

The contact person for questions regarding the 2013-2014 SDRP is:

Gregory Hanks

Assistant Division Chief for Geographic Partnerships

U.S. Census Bureau

Geography Division

Washington, DC 20233

Phone: (301) 763-3093

E-mail: gregory.f.hanks.jr@census.gov