The Distribution of Good Amenities Around Seattle’s Public & Private High SchoolsGEOGRAPHY 461-TA MEGAN BROWN BY: HO YAN CHAN/JIN YANG LUO/ALYSSA ROSAL

MARCH 10, 2015

10 MINUTES 20 MINUTES

Amenities Around Private High Schools in Walking Distance

IntroductionStudents spend most of their day in schools and in the surrounding areas. The different varieties of amenities around their schools can be very important for students’ development, particularly in their capable reach distances. Therefore, the concern around between students studying in public and private schools in sharing different access to equal rights of accessibilities the nearby amenities. However, as we noticed, the surrounding environment of public schools and private schools are not so similar. In order to study the distribution pattern of the amenities around the schools, we constructed our study with the applications of GIS technology. We mainly focused our study at the public and private high schools in Seattle. We believed that high school students have relatively greater chances to make use of the amenities near their schools’ area than the elementary and middle schools students since they were capable to control their free time. Thus, we did a research on both 10 minutes and 5 minutes walking distance amenities around both public and private school. Also, we only take the good amenities, which are useful for students’ development, into account when we are constructing the research. The main purpose of the study is to identify the surrounding amenities differences between the schools and count the number of amenities that are provided near the schools’ surrounding environment within certain walking distances. By looking at the amenities available for students in public and private high schools, we would like to see whether private schools are more equipped than the public schools and does this imply any problems of environmental justice.

Amenities Around Public High Schools in Walking Distance

Public High Schools Private High Schools

20 MINUTES 10 MINUTES 20 MINUTES 10 MINUTES

Number of Good food facilities

Sum: 778 Mean: 38.9

Sum: 160 Mean: 10.666667

Sum: 354 Mean: 70.8

Sum: 61 Mean: 12.2

Libraries 13 6 4 1

Community Centers 13 7 3 1

Park/Greenspace 43 15 16 3

Swimming Pools 23 12 5 1

Sum of Amenities 870 200 382 67

Sum of Amenities Per School 58 13.33333333 76.4 13.4

Food Facilities Per School 51.86666667 10.66666667 70.8 12.2

Other Amenities Per School 6.133333333 2.666666667 5.6 1.2

10 MINUTES

Methods & Spatial OperationDefining Amenities

We first created a list of the available resources that could be found as the amenities. Then, we defined several amenities among them all to be good for student, including food facilities, public libraries, swimming pools, community centers and play areas. We then also defined food facilities into different categories so that we can exclude the bad amenities, such as fast food restaurants.

Locating and Geocoding Public and Private High Schools in Seattle

We found the schools data from the City of Seattle and then segregated the private high school and the public high school from the attribute table using “Select by Attribute” tool. However, as we discovered the private schools data source were not complete, we then geocoded the rest of the locations for the private high schools that we were not able to find in the data source.

Defining Walking Distances & Network Analysis

We decided to produce two different walking distances at 10 minutes and 20 minutes between the high schools and the good amenities for comparing the final results. Then, we obtained the road network data source from King County GIS Data Portal and added the data source into ArcGIS map by using network analyst extension. After setting up the road network in ArcGIS map, we added a field for calculating the time duration to walk in each segment of the road in the attribute table. In order to do so, we first found out that people normally walk at 4.54667 feet/sec according to our Google research. We use the attribute calculator in length divide by speed for the time duration. After that, we combined our road network with public high school and private high school point layers to create four different polygon layers by using service area tool in selecting the 10 minutes and 20 minutes walking distance for our walking time duration.

Clipping and joining the layers

Through the four polygon layers were created in service area, we combined with the initial data we gain from the amenities to directly accomplish the analysis with the clip feature in each layer. Additionally, since some of the original data form the amenities contains the resources we seek bad for student, for example, in the food data resource, there contains the fast-food restaurant that we seek harm for students’ health. Then through select by attribute, we distinguish the good food facilities from the facilities area including the supermarket and the good restaurant(with exemption the place like bar and fast food). Then we combined the four polygon layer through service area with the good food facilities that we select in creating the color dual to represent the number of good food facilities in the 20 minutes and 10 minutes walking distance via private and public schools. Additionally, we add the point in different color in represent different amenities around public schools and private schools within 10 minutes and 20 minutes walking distance.

Findings & ConclusionFrom the maps that we have created, the number of good amenities around the public

high schools are more than the private high schools in Seattle. Within a 10-minute walk, there are a total of 200 good amenities around the public high schools, which each of the schools has approximately 13 good amenities around them. For the private high schools, there are 67 good amenities located around the area, and each schools also has about 13 amenities around them. Comparing to the good amenities found around the schools within a 20-minute walk, there are 870 amenities around the public high schools, which each school has about 58 amenities covered. For the private high schools, there are 382 good amenities around, which each school has as much as 76 amenities covered.

By looking at the number of amenities the public and private schools have within 10 minutes walking distance, they seem to share a similar number of amenities for supporting the students. However, they are not in fact having an equal accessibility of different kinds of amenities. There are most food facilities around the private high schools with the number of a proximately 12 and 71 food facilities around the school at 10- and 20- minute walk respectively. Comparing to the public high schools, there are about 11 and 52 food facilities around the school areas within a 10- and 20- minute walk respectively. These showed that private high schools have more accessibility to the food facilities than the public high schools. However, the public high schools have a greater accessibility to the other good amenities in return. From the table above, each public high school is covered by 2.7 and 6.1 other good amenities within 10- and 20- minute walk respectively, where each private high school only has 1.2 and 5.6 other good amenities covered with 10 and 20 minutes walking distance.

This phenomenon can be explained by a few reasons. First of all, as the private high schools tend to locate in higher income neighborhoods, more people are willing to invest on operating food facilities, especially the finer restaurants. Therefore, the number of good food facilities found in the private high school areas is more than in the public high school areas. Another reason is that since the public high schools are financed by the government, the choice of locations of the public amenities, including libraries and community centers will tend to locate places near the other public facilities too. Thus, public high schools are surrounded by more publicly owned amenities than the private high schools

ReferencesAustin, S. et al. (2005). “Clustering of Fast-Food Restaurants Around Schools: A novel application of spatial statistics to the study of food environments.” American Journal of Public Health, 95(9).Green, J. and Zandbergen, P. (2007). “Error and Bias in Determining Exposure Potential of Children at School Locations Using Proximity-Based GIS Techniques.” Environmental Health Perspectives, 115(9).Panter, Jenna R., et al. “Neighborhood, Route, and School Environments and Children’s Active Commuting.” American Journal of Preventive Medicine: 268-278. Print. Schlossberg, Marc., et al. (2006). “School Trips: Effects of Urban Form and Distance on Travel Mode.” Journal of the American Planning Association, 72(2).

20 MINUTES

Data file Source Format Links

Public School

City of Seattle

Shapefile https://wagda.lib.washington.edu/data/geography/wa_cities/seattle/data/commserve/pubsch.zip

Private School

City of Seattle

Shapefile https://wagda.lib.washington.edu/data/geography/wa_cities/seattle/data/commserve/PRIVSCH.zip

Library City of Seattle

Shapefile https://wagda.lib.washington.edu/data/geography/wa_cities/seattle/data/commserve/library.zip

Metro Transportation Network (TNET) in King County

King County

Network Dataset

ftp://ftp.kingcounty.gov/gis/Web/GISData/trans_network_SHP.zip

Food facilities

King County

Shapefile ftp://ftp.kingcounty.gov/gis/Web/GISData/food_facilities_SHP.zip

Community center

City of Seattle

Shapefile https://wagda.lib.washington.edu/data/geography/wa_cities/seattle/data/commserve/commcntr.zip

Park/green space

City of Seattle

Shapefile https://wagda.lib.washington.edu/data/geography/wa_cities/seattle/data/terrain/park.zip

Swimming pool

City of Seattle

Shapefile https://wagda.lib.washington.edu/data/geography/wa_cities/seattle/data/commserve/swim.zip

Swimming area at beaches

City of Seattle

Shapefile https://wagda.lib.washington.edu/data/geography/wa_cities/seattle/data/commserve/swimbeach.zip

neighborhood boundary

King County

Shapefile ftp://ftp.kingcounty.gov/gis/Web/GISData/politicl_SHP.zip

Cartographic ModelData Resources