School Attendance Area Boundaries, Minnesota, SY2025-26

This file represents the boundaries of all reported public school attendance areas in the state of Minnesota for school year 2025-26. Attendance areas attempt to represent the detailed sub-district breakdowns that determine where students attend elementary, middle, and high schools. These areas are unique to each public school system, and this file is only a generalization of those breakdowns.<br/><br/>In most cases, users are interested in the "dissolved" school district boundaries, without attendance area breakdowns. Those boundaries are available in a separate resource, with one record for each independent, common, and special school district in Minnesota. For many districts that operate only a few schools, attendance area breakdowns are not used or defined; in those cases, attendance areas are equivalent to district boundaries.<br/><br/>Each year Minnesota public school systems are asked to report any changes to their elementary, middle and high school attendance area boundaries. This file was developed from this annual information. Users should be aware that reporting compliance is not mandatory, so the information included is only as accurate as provided by those independent, common, and special school districts. Actual decisions on where students attend which schools are made entirely by the districts, and changes are not always reported to MDE.<br/><br/>Please also see Horizontal Positional Accuracy notes in the school district boundary dataset, many of which also apply to this layer.<br/><br/>