D65 Boundary Overlay & School Closure Analysis Tool

Sources

• Boundary lines. District 65's "FY28 Proposed Boundaries" Google map: the 2026-27 layer (today) and the "Oct. 23, 2026 Proposed Boundaries" layer, pulled October 23, 2026, and drawn on a street basemap from the U.S. Census 2023 road file (the same map frame as the Map Explorer). The Oct 23 layer also draws King Arts' small neighborhood area west of Dodge; it is King Arts' area today too, so it is left out of Dewey's 2026-27 area. Earlier versions of this page used the Oct 13 layer ("FY28 Tentative Boundaries," downloaded October 14).
• Enrollment. October 1, 2026 enrollment by school (3,204 K-5 students across the ten neighborhood elementary schools; 1,759 at Chute, Haven and Nichols). King Arts, Park, Hill and other programs are not included.
• Student moves. The district's counts for the Oct 23 draft, shared October 28, 2026 ("Boundary Impacts for LODN" sheet): 660 current K-4 students change school (Lincolnwood to Willard 154, Dewey to Washington 73, Dewey to Lincoln 42, Lincolnwood to Foster 38, Lincoln to Oakton 37, Washington to Dawes 37, Oakton to Dawes 19, Dewey to Orrington 10, Dewey to Foster under 10, 31 to King Arts); 144 change elementary and middle school. Program and transfer moves are withheld by area.
• Where students live. U.S. Census Bureau American Community Survey 2020-2024 5-year estimates, table B14002 (school enrollment by level and public or private school), by block group. Within each block group, students are placed on census blocks by each block's under-18 population in the 2020 Census (redistricting file P1 and P3). Block and district lines are 2020 TIGER files, including the Census Bureau's boundary for Evanston Community Consolidated School District 65, so the Skokie part of the district is included.
• Who lives there tabs and kid-based walking distance. 2020 Census Demographic and Housing Characteristics, table P12 (kids ages 5 to 9 and 10 to 14 by block) and tables P12B, P12H, P12I, P12J, P12L and P12O (by race and ethnicity); 2000 and 2010 Census Summary File 1, table P12, with 2000 and 2010 block shapes; 2020 TIGER/Line blocks and roads; ACS 2020-2024 table B14002 for the private school share, by tract; Illinois Report Card school profiles (enrollment, low income, English learners, IEPs, homelessness, attendance, chronic truancy, class size); and the district's Oct 28, 2026 counts of students changing schools on the Oct 23 draft.
• Feeder pattern. Slide 18 of the October 13, 2026 board deck. The district has not published 2027-28 middle school zones.

Methods

• Land area tabs measure the share of each FY27 attendance area's land that moves to each new zone. Parks, campus and cemetery land count the same as homes. About 83 lakefront acres are left out because the two maps don't line up there.
• Student tabs split each school's October 1 enrollment using the district's own totals. Where the district hasn't said how Dewey students divide between Lincoln and Washington, figures are shown as a range with its midpoint.
• Boundary builder divides the map into cells about 200 feet across. Each cell's students come from the FY27 area and Oct 23 zone it falls in, following where children live by census block. Public school K-5 students per block group come from ACS table B14002 (kindergarten, grades 1-4, and a quarter of grades 5-8), then are placed on blocks by 2020 under-18 population. By default each FY27 area's census total is matched to its school's October 1 enrollment, so the FY27 zones reproduce actual counts and the census decides where within each area students live. You can switch to one district-wide factor (census counts times 0.75, so the ten schools total 3,204) or back to the earlier even-by-land spread. Each school's grade counts are an even sixth of its total, since grade-level counts by school aren't published. Sections are the fewest classes that keep each grade at or under the class size cap, and classrooms are the district's homeroom room counts. Utilization divides students by seats: the lower of the district's teaching stations × 24 and the 2022 Cordogan Clark capacity (the same rule as the other LoDN maps). The district's FY28 table (October 7, 2026) gives different numbers for some schools, for example Willard 512 and Orrington 360.
• Who lives there tabs count residents, not enrolled students: 2020 Census kids by block (ages 5 to 10 for K-5), so kids at King Arts, private or charter schools are included. Ages 10 to 14 come as one group, so single ages are split evenly. These tabs use their own map alignment (by street intersections, accurate to about a block), so their lines can differ slightly from the land area tabs. Kid-based walking distance follows streets, alleys and paths from each census block to its assigned school (2023 Census road file; expressways and ramps left out), the same walks used on the Map Explorer.
• Middle school zones are elementary zones grouped by feeder. Middle school student counts are a rough end state using 0.55 middle schoolers per K-5 student, and changes would phase in with incoming 6th graders.

Limits

• This is a preliminary, unofficial reconstruction. Lines may be offset from the basemap, so check a specific address on the district's interactive map.
• Student estimates treat each school's enrollment as if all of its students live in its attendance area, spread across it evenly. The builder's census layer now models how students are spread within an area, but students attending a school outside their home area are still not modeled. That includes Two-Way Immersion (TWI) and STEP students, whose home addresses we don't have, so builder counts are rough estimates only. The ACS counts about 4,280 public school K-5 children living in these ten areas, against 3,204 enrolled at the ten schools; the rest attend King Arts, other district programs, or are survey error. Block group estimates carry wide margins of error (often plus or minus 30 to 60 students), and the 2020 block counts are six years old, so new buildings since 2020 are missed. The census-to-enrollment ratio varies by area, from 0.43 in Lincoln to 2.28 in Lincolnwood.

This whole tool is one self-contained HTML file with no server, accounts or tracking. You're welcome to adapt it for your own analysis. Please keep it labeled as unofficial and check figures against the district's own documents.

1. Get a copy

• Save this page (File, then Save Page As, "Webpage, HTML only") or copy its source. Open the saved file in any browser to run it, and edit it in any text editor.
• An easy way to make changes is to give the file to an AI assistant such as Claude and describe what you want in plain words.

2. Where things are in the file

• Enrollment: ENR holds October 1, 2026 K-5 enrollment by school. Update it each fall.
• Capacity and rooms: CAP holds the seats used for utilization (lower of teaching stations × 24 and Cordogan Clark), and ROOMS holds homeroom counts. The class size cap defaults to 24 (the dwmax input).
• Boundaries: D.old (2026-27 attendance areas), D.new (Oct 23 draft zones) and D.schools (school locations) are polygons in the map image's pixel coordinates (1324 by 1324 pixels, about 0.0032 miles per pixel). Middle school zones are in MS.
• Student density: CEN holds students per builder cell. Cells are 12 pixels (about 200 feet), and each key is row × 111 + column. A is matched to each school's October 1 count and D uses one district-wide factor.
• Student-tab flows: SF holds the district-based estimates of how many students move between schools.

3. Rebuild the census layer (for example, with newer ACS data)

• Download ACS 5-year table B14002 for block groups from the Census Bureau's table-based summary files (www2.census.gov, programs-surveys/acs/summary_file). Public K-5 = public kindergarten + public grades 1-4 + one quarter of public grades 5-8, for both sexes.
• Download the 2020 redistricting file (PL 94-171) for Illinois. Under-18 per block = P1_001 minus P3_001. Spread each block group's K-5 count across its blocks by under-18 share.
• Get 2020 block shapes and the District 65 boundary (elementary school district GEOID 1714460) from TIGERweb.
• Convert longitude and latitude to map pixels. In local miles (x = (lon + 87.70) × 51.36, y = (lat − 42.045) × 69.0), a map pixel (px, py) sits at: take (px × 0.003147, −py × 0.003217), rotate it 0.29 degrees counterclockwise, then add (−1.959, 2.124). Invert that to go from blocks to pixels. That fit matches the Census district outline with 98% overlap.
• Cut each block into the 12-pixel cells and attendance areas, scale each area to its school's enrollment, and replace CEN.

4. Ideas for improvement

• Use real grade-level counts by school instead of even sixths, if the district publishes them.
• Model students who attend a school outside their home area (King Arts, two-way immersion, transfers).
• Add newer housing since 2020 using building permits.
• Use walking routes instead of straight-line distance.