An optimization-based study on the redeployment of a secondary school network

In this paper we report the results of a study on secondary school planning made within the framework of Coimbra's Educational Charter. Coimbra is a medium-sized municipality of 320 km(2) and 150000 inhabitants located in the center-littoral region of Portugal. The planning problem addressed in the study consisted of defining the location, type, and size of the schools that should integrate Coimbra's secondary school network in 2015, given, first, the excess of aggregate school capacity that currently characterizes the municipality, and, second, the change in school typology that needs to be implemented as a consequence of a recent reorganization of the Portuguese educational system. This problem was analyzed with a discrete facility-location model and considers decisions both of closing existing schools and of opening new schools. The model is a variant of the well-known p-median model, which aims at maximizing the accessibility of students to schools, with constraints on maximum and minimum capacity occupation that make model solutions lose the single assignment and closest assignment properties. As these are desirable properties in a public-facility planning context, they are enforced with explicit constraints. The results obtained through the model are discussed from the standpoint of the trade-off between school accessibility improvements and school network changes.