Poudre School District
2024
Key graphic visualizations help the Poudre School District (PSD) in Northern Colorado understand the implications of proposed scenarios for school consolidation. When looked at through a lens of urban planning, mapping helps shed light on a ‘School Desert’ inadvertently created in the center of the city, where elementary-aged students from a large geographic area can no longer walk or bike to school. Subsequently, a simple chart was made using the district’s ‘Equity Index’ metric for each elementary school, highlighting how the closure selection process disproportionately affects at-risk students in the district. Ultimately, the District determined that an alternate process was needed to move ahead with any school consolidation scenarios.
In Chalk the Walk, students’ artwork served as the creative inspiration for a super-graphic chalk mural at a PSD Elementary School. Parent volunteers set out the graphic in a ‘color by number’ format, and students from all grades in the school spent an afternoon taking turns chalking the mural of three mountains. A kindergartener’s illustration of a bighorn stands at the precipice of the highest peak. A second-grader’s idea of students holding hands while climbing a mountain is realized when the graduating 5th-grade class poses for a drone photo when the mural is complete.
Chalk the Walk mural project team: Kate Bedford, Tory Pappas, Hannah Wilbur, Eric Sunderland, Todd Blankenship, and the staff, teachers, and students at Beattie Elementary School
Graphic Visualizations
