High School Attendance Boundaries for Chicago Public Schools

Chicago Public Schools provides geospatial attendance boundaries for its high schools for the 2024-2025 school year. The dataset, maintained by data.cityofchicago.org, was last updated in September 2025. It includes geographic polygons and associated school information.

Use Cases

• Mapping school catchment areas using the `the_geom` column to visualize geographic coverage.
• Joining school-level data from other sources using the `SCHOOL_ID` or `SCHOOL_NAM` fields for demographic analysis.
• Analyzing the `GRADE_CAT` and `BOUNDARYGR` columns to understand which grade categories are served by specific boundary polygons.
• Calculating distances from residential addresses to assigned schools using the `SCHOOL_ADD` and geographic boundary data.

Strengths

• Geographic data is current for the 2024-2025 school year.
• Includes a unique geometry column (`the_geom`) for spatial operations.
• Provides key identifiers (`SCHOOL_ID`, `SCHOOL_NAM`) for data linkage.

Limitations

• Unknown row count prevents assessment of completeness for all schools.
• Lacks temporal depth as it only covers a single school year.
• Sample data is unavailable to verify data quality and structure.

Provenance

Source

data.cityofchicago.org

Collection Method

null

Time Range

School Year 2024-2025

Freshness

Last updated September 2025.

Geography

Chicago, Illinois, USA