By admin 
TUCSON, Ariz. (13 News) – As Tucson Unified School District considers which schools to close or consolidate, families are facing questions about the future of their neighborhood schools.
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Declining enrollment, underused buildings, and financial pressures are among the challenges facing the district. But how do individual schools compare, and what does the data reveal?
LAST BELL SERIES
13 News has created an interactive dashboard, which you can see at the top of this story, that allows parents and taxpayers to examine the numbers for themselves.
Using publicly available district and state data, we analyzed several factors that can help explain the challenges facing individual schools.
Explore Your School
The interactive map, which can be seen at the top of this story, allows you to search for a TUSD school and examine information including:
Student enrollment: How many students attend the school and how enrollment has changed over time.
- School capacity: How much of the school’s available space is being used.
- Student capture rate: The percentage of students living within a school’s attendance area who actually attend that school.
- Spending per student: How much the district budgets per student at individual campuses, allowing comparisons among schools.
- Academic performance: Available student achievement data that provides additional context.
These numbers can reveal significant differences among schools, including campuses that have lost large portions of their enrollment while continuing to operate buildings designed for many more students.
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What Data Can Tell Us
A school with declining enrollment may face different financial and operational challenges than one operating near capacity.
Higher spending per student may also reflect the cost of operating a school with fewer students. Programs, staffing, and other campus-specific needs can influence those figures.
Capture rates offer another perspective by showing how many students living within a school’s attendance boundaries choose to attend that school.
Each measure provides part of the picture. School programs, student needs, transportation, and the surrounding community also matter when evaluating potential closures.
The dashboard is an independent 13 News analysis. It does not identify which schools TUSD has decided to close or recommend that any particular campus be closed.
As the district moves forward with its recommendations, this interactive tool gives families a way to examine their schools, compare the data, and ask informed questions about the decisions ahead.
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