The Arkansas GIS Office in partnership with the University of Central Arkansas (UCA), Geography Program and the UCA Archives is pleased to announce the availability of historic school district maps for download on gis.arkansas.gov.  These maps are published as GeoTiff reference files for GIS users and also as Adobe Portable Document Format (PDF) for the general public.

This series of 1936 county school district maps for Arkansas represents the state’s contribution to a 1935 United States Office of Education study of local school organization and administration.  The original project developed current school district maps and school consolidation plans for all 75 Arkansas counties and their 3,134 school administrative units based on data the 1935-36 school year, although maps for Desha, Greene, and Stone Counties were missing from the University of Central Arkansas collection from which the scanned map images were obtained.

Maps accompanying the 1937 Study of Local School Units in Arkansas report were scanned at 300 DPI and then georeferenced between May 1 – July 5, 2022.  Map scans were registered using distinctive tie points between the maps and contemporary GIS data consisting of US Public Land Survey Townships projected to UTM.  Among the series of 72 extant maps, the average number of control points was 61.7, with an average RMSE of 54.7 m.  This was sufficient to achieve a third order polynomial transformation.

For additional information please visit the product page below.

1936 School Districts in Arkansas Study