School District Planning Problem with consideration of Transfer for Consolidation

Abstract

A society with a declining population needs to consolidate elementary and junior high schools. In most existing methods for optimizing school districts, however, the objective function is set from the perspective of school administrators, and the psychological burden on students is not considered. In this paper, we propose a new school district planning problem that considers the burden on current students. The first factor of the psychological burden on students is the transfer of current students when consolidating elementary and junior high schools. The second factor is the alumni of elementary school going on to different junior high schools from their classmates. Our formulation obtains an optimal school district reorganization plan which considers the trade-off between the burden on students and the cost of school operation under the condition that there is no transfer of students due to consolidation and no separation of students when they enter junior high schools.