Title: 

Advances in School District Design: Addressing Inequities and Planning for the Future

Abstract:

For decades, public school districts in the United States have faced complex decisions related to school district design. School desegregation in 1954 led to a series of operations research approaches to support these decisions. In this talk, we present a new modeling framework for the school district design problem, developed in partnership with a local school district, to facilitate an iterative community co-design process to address historic inequities in access to education and improve student assignment. This process led to recommendations and policy outcomes, including the school board’s approval of a new school and revised school attendance boundaries. At the core of our approach is a novel formulation that consolidates multiple assignment decisions, capturing their interactions through composite variables. The compact nature of this formulation makes it amenable to important extensions. Notably, we consider time-expanded versions of the model that allow districts to plan for multiple years. Importantly, these time-expanded district design models consider continuity in students’ educational experiences over time periods that may include the opening and closing of schools. This model can also incorporate uncertainty in future student enrollment over the planning horizon. Testing these new models is challenging given the lack of shareable data sets due to sensitive student information. To address this, we developed a method to create context-rich data sets for school operations models and methods relying only on publicly available data.

Bio:

Aysu Ozel is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Industrial Engineering and Management Sciences at Northwestern University. Her dissertation research focuses on developing models and solution approaches to support decision-making for school district design. Her work has been recognized as the Winner of the 2023 INFORMS Doing Good with Good OR Student Paper Competition and a Finalist for the 2023 INFORMS DEI Best Student Paper Award. She is a Dissertation Year Fellow of Northwestern University Transportation Center and a Terminal Year Fellow of McCormick School of Engineering. Before her doctoral program, Aysu earned her M.S. and B.S. degrees in Industrial Engineering from Bilkent University.