Where do the 10+mi riders live?

I got an early holiday present on Thursday: a response to my open records request to HISD for data on the magnet students riding 10+ miles to their programs. I was pleasantly surprised; I'd not received an acknowledgment, and was about to send a "snail mail" follow up to my original email request.

Part of what I found out can be seen graphically here at Geocommons.com, a web site that lets you upload geo-coded data and see it plotted on a Google (or Yahoo or Open Street Maps) map. You can have several "overlays" if you like, each corresponding to a data set. The data on that map shows how many students travel 10+ miles from each zip code - it's their home code, not the destination. I also received a long list of every school and the number of 10+ mile riders, and I got a small table explaining the racial breakdown of the same group:

Race	Percentage of 10+mi riders	Percentage of District
White	10%	8%
African American	48%	28%
Hispanic	34%	60%
Asian	8%	3%
Native American	<1%	<1%

In my request, I asked for income level bands, which they don't have; but I did get the response that 84% of the 10+ riders qualify for free/reduced lunches (this was also reported in the Houston Chronicle today). I also asked for the same distribution information for the magnet program as a whole, and for the district; I got the district racial breakdown from a different source, which also pointed out that district-wide, 79% of the students qualify for free or reduced lunches.

I worry that reducing or eliminating services for the 10+mi riders will make magnet attendance difficult for 84% of them (2822 students). They are likely to have the least flexibility in their schedules or access to transportation.

Resouces:

• geocommons.com
• batchgeocode.com calculates lat/long coordinates for a batch of addresses
• swivel.com lets you graph various data sets, but I didn't really get the hang of it. Looks cool though.