The School Attendance Boundary Information System (SABINS) was a National Science Foundation-funded project to provide, free of charge, aggregate census data and GIS-compatible boundary files for school attendance areas, or school catchment areas, for selected areas in the United States for the 2009-10, 2010-11 and 2011-12 school years. Funding for the SABINS project has ended, and no future data releases are planned. The census and GIS data are available through the NHGIS data finder.
Until August 2021, SABINS project information and supplemental datasets had been distributed through a SABINS-specific website. The key information and datasets from that site can now be accessed through this page.
SABINS was a joint project between IPUMS and The College of William & Mary. Principal investigators were John Robert Warren (IPUMS and the University of Minnesota) and Salvatore Saporito (The College of William & Mary).
User's Guide
Access guides for acquiring census and GIS data for school attendance areas, joining those data with school information from the National Center for Education Statistics' (NCES) Common Core of Data, and learning about the database design underlying the school attendance boundaries.
Public School Data
Access crosswalks that link school attendance boundaries to schools from the NCES Common Core of Data, crosswalks that link 2010 census blocks to school attendance boundaries, and other supplemental data created for SABINS.
Data availability
Learn about statistical and geographic data available for school attendance boundaries in SABINS.
GIS Data Documentation
Learn more about the sources from which we built the school attendance boundary mapping files and demographic characteristics.
RELEASE LOG
Learn about the SABINS releases that occurred between 2011 and 2015.