Jackson Mumper

GIS and Academic Portfolio

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The Alamosa, Colorado RE-11J School District includes most of Alamosa and some of Conejos Counties in Colorado. The Alamosa School Board is elected from 7 director districts delineated from within the larger school district. These exist to ensure the school board is composed of members from different geographic neighborhoods of the town and community. While board members campaign and are represent their director district on the board, all residents of the Alamosa School District vote for all seven members.

As they are representative voting districts, director districts must be redrawn every ten years, following the US Census, to ensure that each has equal population. As of 2019, however, the Alamosa director districts had not been reapportioned since 2001. The images below show the director district maps from 2001.

old_map_town_zoom old_map_dist_zoom

While they were roughly equal when first drawn, these districts grew unbalanced in the following 20 years, as shown in the table below.

District	Population 2000	Population 2010	Population 2020	Percent Change
One	1918	2069	2650	38.16
Two	1943	1708	1580	-18.68
Three	1944	1807	1943	-0.05
Four	2001	2243	2059	2.90
Five	1989	1982	2184	9.80
Six	1976	2126	2053	3.90
Seven	1947	2380	2855	46.66

Total	13718	14315	15324	11.71
Percent Variation	4.37	39.34	80.69

I worked alongside the Alamosa School District to reapportion its director districts following the 2020 Census. I downloaded census block level population data using the tidycensus package in R-Studio, and drew a preliminary set of maps of director districts with equal population. I then discussed my findings with the board, and we worked conjunctly to create the following districts.

curr_town_zoom curr_dist_zoom

These maps were approved by the Alamosa School District on October 5, 2021 and are now in official use.