VISUALIZED AMERICAN PUBLIC SCHOOLS · AZ
Arizona Public Schools
The canvas comes first: every public school district in Arizona, drawn from the federal boundary files. The data layers — enrollment change, funding, teachers, achievement — are built on top of this map, Missouri-style, in phases.
THE DISTRICT MAP
School district boundaries
Hover any district for its name. Boundaries are the 2024–25 school-year files from NCES EDGE / U.S. Census TIGER.
MAP IN PREPARATION
The Arizona district boundary file hasn’t been generated yet.
Run scripts/make_boundaries.sh to rebuild boundaries/arizona.geojson, then redeploy.
Source: NCES EDGE Composite School District Boundaries, 2024–25 (via U.S. Census TIGER/Line). Unified and elementary districts shown; secondary districts omitted.
200 districts are drawn on this map — 97 unified and 103 elementary.
How districts are drawn here. Arizona has separate elementary and secondary school districts whose territories overlap. To keep the map readable, it shows unified districts plus elementary districts — together they tile the state exactly, with no gaps and no overlaps. The 15 secondary districts are not drawn, because they sit on top of the elementary districts rather than beside them. Data joined to this map follows the same rule.
A note about charter schools. Charter schools enroll about 21% of Arizona’s public-school students, and they are not represented on this map. In Arizona most charters are authorized by the State Board for Charter Schools rather than by school districts: they operate outside the district system, are usually their own local education agency, and often enroll students across district lines. So this map describes Arizona’s geographic district system — not its whole public-school population. That distinction matters here more than in most states, and it will matter for every data layer built on top of this map.