Austin ISD 2022-23 Enrollment, and a Test of Datawrapper

I've made some very simple maps with Datawrapper, but I can see that it's a very powerful tool, and I want to test its embed functionality. So here; the enrollment of every zoned school in the Austin Independent School District.

The average size of the elementary schools is heavily skewed by Blazier, which has two campuses and is very much an outlier. There are dozens of elementaries that are tiny, and should probably be consolidated, but every attempt to actually do that has been extremely controversial in the past. Some of the city's smallest schools are actually getting tens of millions of new investments as part of the recently passed 2022 Bond, like Oak Springs and Wooten.

The middle schools are an interesting bunch. The two smallest of the lot, Martin and Mendez, only offer 7th & 8th grades, which makes them appear smaller than they should be. But before they dropped 6th grade about three years ago, they were already the two smallest. The largest, Gorzycki, is also the newest, opening in 2009. And the district's second largest, Kealing, is only that size because of its substantial magnet program. Without the hundreds of kids attending from outside its zone, Kealing would be closer in size to Martin than Gorzycki.

There isn't much to say about Austin ISD's high schools based on this limited dataset. The largest schools all sit on the Southern and Western edge of the district, and the smallest all lie on the East, but that's a relatively recent development. There's a lot of disparities in this set of schools, but enrollment alone can't show that. Akins and Bowie, the district's two largest schools, are different in nearly every way but their size. And neighboring McCallum and Navarro, both mid-sized schools, could not have less in common. But those are stories for other maps...

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