The National Center for Education Statistics’ (NCES) Education Demographic and Geographic Estimate (EDGE) program develops annually updated school district boundary composite files that include public elementary, secondary, and unified school district boundaries clipped to the U.S. shoreline. School districts are single-purpose administrative units designed by state and local officials to organize and provide public education for local residents. District boundaries are collected for NCES by the U.S. Census Bureau to support educational research and program administration, and the boundaries are essential for constructing district-level estimates of the number of children in poverty.

The Census Bureau’s School District Boundary Review program (SDRP) (https://www.census.gov/geo/partnerships/sdrp.html) obtains the boundaries, names, and grade ranges from state officials, and integrates these updates into Census TIGER/Line. Although the Census Bureau updates TIGER/Line every year, the SDBR is a biennial update conducted on the odd-numbered years, therefore district boundaries for a given school year persist in TIGER for two years (e.g., boundaries for the 2015-2016 school year are included in TIGER/Line 2016 and 2017). Census TIGER boundaries include legal maritime buffers for coastal areas by default, but the NCES composite file removes these buffers to facilitate broader use and cleaner cartographic representation. The NCES EDGE program collaborates with the U.S. Census Bureau’s Education Demographic, Geographic, and Economic Statistics (EDGE) Branch to develop the composite school district files. The inputs for this data layer were developed from Census TIGER/Line 2016 and represent boundaries reported for the 2015-2016 school year. For more information about NCES school district boundary data, see:  https://nces.ed.gov/programs/edge/Geographic/DistrictBoundaries.