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Note: This district appears to have with open enrollment. This means students may be assigned schools based on factors other than geography. So this analysis may not be applicable or insightful for your district.

First, let's look at how segregated your neighborhood is

The most practical place for your child to attend school would be the one that is closest to your house, even though it perpetuates the underlying housing segregation that exists in virtually every community.

That's why both Richards and Monarrez decided to make maps of what school attendance zones would look like if we followed this rule. Monarrez shared his data with us so we can map your district.

Here's how that would play out in during the 2013 school year.

Since you didn't choose a district, we'll use the in so you can see what's happening.

Here's a sampling of what attendance zones would look like around the country if everyone was put into the nearest elementary school:

That's why if students just go to the nearest school, it creates classrooms that are just as segregated as the underlying, socially engineered neighborhoods.

But what if we used these school attendance zones to send kids to schools that aren't as homogenous as their neighborhoods? What if these school attendance zones broke from the heavily entrenched racial boundaries?

Is this what your district does?

Is your district using attendance zones to lessen the underlying segregation?

, according to Monarrez's method. (We'll explain more below.)

In the past, it was virtually impossible to conduct nationwide studies on school attendance zones. But work from sociologist Salvatore Saporito, who first started gathering data on school attendance boundaries in the early 2000s, as well as contributions from Richards and Monarrez, have helped us zoom into a huge portion of American school districts to point the microscope on ourselves in a clear and concise way.

And thanks to Monarrez, who shared his data with us, we can tell the story of your district.

Below is a map of the elementary school boundary zones for from the 2013 school year. So if you live in that area, your child goes to elementary school with everyone else in that area. (You should try toggling between this map and the previous one.)

It might be hard to see exactly what's happening on the map, so Monarrez found a way to clarify what is happening.

If a district creates attendance zones that perfectly recreate the underlying segregation (which is what we see in the first map), then we can chart it out like this:

But most districts don't do this. Instead, there are districts that zone more white kids into already heavily white schools, and zone more black and Hispanic kids into the same schools. That causes a steep line like this:

And there are districts that purposely draw attendance zones across different neighborhoods, which bring black and Hispanic kids into white neighborhoods and vice versa. That creates a flatter line, like this:

Now that you know how to read this chart, let's how your district does. Toggle this chart below to see if it flattens out or gets steeper:

Monarrez found that, in most districts, the actual school borders produced slightly less segregated schools than sending everyone to the nearest school — but it's a small enough effect that they are essentially reproducing the underlying segregation.

If it feels like we're trying to fight a dinosaur with a fly swatter, there's a reason for that. It's because the courts have interpreted the laws in such a way that we've been stripped of more effective tools to integrate schools.