VALERIE EDWARDS

In 1990, I graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Department of Urban Studies and Planning with a Master in City Planning degree. In 1995, I became an analyst for Boston Mayor Thomas Menino's Blue Ribbon Commission on Schools, where our team worked on developing a 10-year demonstration Capital Master Plan for Boston's Public Schools.

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The following year, I was hired by the Boston Public Schools (BPS) to help their Capital Planning Office transition the Blue Ribbon Commission's demonstration capital master plan into a working $250-million long-range Capital Master Plan. During the ten years that I worked for the Boston Public Schools, I served as Strategic Planning Manager and provided capital planning, budgeting, analysis, and strategy management services to BPS Executives and School Committee.

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In one of the most exciting projects that I worked on during my tenure with the BPS, I headed the panel which developed improvements to Boston's student assignment operations to correct problems with equity and school choice options. I worked with internationally-known game-theory economists Al Roth (winner of 2012 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences), Atila Abdulkadiroglu, Parag Pathak and Tayfun Sönmez to re-model Boston's student assignment algorithm, which improved equity and parental satisfaction. See "The Boston Public School Match" in The American Economic Review (May 2005).

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In 2004, I was recruited by the Los Angeles Unified School District to head the analytic team of their Master Planning and Demographics Unit (MPD) as Chief Enrollment Analysis Coordinator, and I was later promoted to serve as the Unit's Deputy Director. In this capacity, I was in charge of strategic planning and coordination of all demographic analysis and enrollment projections in support of LAUSD's 675,000 students and $14 billion facilities Strategic Execution Plan. Building on the experience with school choice modeling I had in Boston, I developed and implemented the SABR (School Assignment By Record) process, which determines students’ resident school assignments using an algorithm that simulates the school choice behavior of students living in option areas. 

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For one of my favorite projects at LAUSD, I led the process of visioning, developing and implementing the web-based enrollment forecast review application, "E-CAST". E-CAST replaced Roadshow, an in-person, paper-based process that typically required Principals and their staff to spend hours off-campus, with an online process whereby a Principal could complete their enrollment forecast review within 20 minutes without leaving their campus. See my sidebar article about E-CAST in the November 2011 issue of the American Planning Association's Planning Magazine, "Improving Enrollment Planning for LA Schools".

 

During my urban planning career, I was a frequent participant at Population Association of America's (PAA) Annual Meetings, serving as session organizer, presenter, panelist and discussant. See the papers my team and I presented to the Population Association of America in 2007 and in 2008. We also participated regularly in the Annual Demographic Workshops held by the Southern Council Association of Governments and the USC Sol Price School of Public Policy. See our listing at the 27th annual workshop in 2016.

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I retired from the urban planning profession in 2022.

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