experiments/09_doe_schools/RESULTS.md

Phase 9 — doe_school_exposure specialist (first output)

Status

First end-to-end output on Coney Island validates. Point-based register specialist on the 1,992 NYC DOE school locations, identical join pattern to the MTA-entrance specialist.

What it does

Per queried (lat, lon), returns up to N schools within radius_m (default 1,500 m), enriched with:

Field	Source	Tier
loc_code, loc_name, address, bin, bbl, managed_by, borough	data/schools.geojson (NYC DOE Locations Points)	reference
distance_m	haversine from query point	computed
elevation_m	data/nyc_dem_30m.tif (USGS 3DEP)	proxy
hand_m	data/hand.tif (derived)	proxy
inside_sandy_2012	point-in-polygon over data/sandy_inundation.geojson	empirical
dep_extreme_2080_class / _label	NYC DEP 3.66 in/hr / 2080 SLR scenario	modeled
dep_moderate_2050_class / _label	NYC DEP 2.13 in/hr / 2050 SLR scenario	modeled

doc_id format: doe_school_<loc_code> (loc_code is the NYC DOE school identifier, e.g. M089, K212).

First output — Coney Island (40.5790, -73.9847)

5 of 5 schools within 1.5 km inside the 2012 Sandy Inundation Zone; 2 of 5 in DEP Extreme-2080 "Deep Contiguous (>4 ft)" band.

School	Address	Elev (m)	Sandy 2012	DEP 2080
Liberation Diploma Plus (K728)	2865 W 19th St	1.25	✓	Deep Contiguous (>4 ft)
P.S. 90 Edna Cohen (K090)	2840 W 12th St	0.55	✓	outside
Mark Twain I.S. 239 (K239)	2401 Neptune Ave	0.10	✓	outside
P.S. 288 Shirley Tanyhill (K288)	2950 W 25th St	0.75	✓	Deep Contiguous (>4 ft)
P.S. 212 Lady Deborah Moody (K212)	87 Bay 49th St	2.82	✓	outside

These are real Sandy-affected schools — Mark Twain I.S. 239 and P.S. 288 in particular were both recovery sites in DOE's post-Sandy Title-I emergency declarations.

Honest scope

• Exposure, not damage forecast. "This school sits inside the 2012 Sandy zone" is a structural claim, not a prediction the building will flood again at the same depth.
• Point-at-school-centroid join. Schools are big buildings; point-in-polygon at the centroid can miss a building whose footprint clips the flood polygon edge. Battery Park City schools (P.S. 89, Stuyvesant HS) returned inside_sandy_2012=false despite real basement flooding in 2012 — their centroid points lie just outside the OEM polygon. Building-footprint joins via PLUTO would catch these edge cases; that's a follow-up.
• 30 m DEM / HAND. Useful for borough-level comparisons, not building-level discrimination.
• No DOE Sandy recovery citations yet. Title-I emergency declarations and HUD CDBG-DR school recovery flows aren't joined in this first cut — same follow-up shape as NYCHA Recovery Plan parsing.

Reproduce

.venv/bin/python experiments/09_doe_schools/specialist.py \
    --lat 40.5790 --lon -73.9847 --radius 1500 --max 5
# Coney Island (5/5 in Sandy zone, 2/5 in DEP deep band)

.venv/bin/python experiments/09_doe_schools/specialist.py \
    --lat 40.7155 --lon -74.0145 --radius 1000 --max 5
# Battery Park City — known centroid-edge case (returns 0/5 even
# though Stuyvesant + P.S. 89 had basement flooding)

Open work (before app/ integration)

1. PLUTO building-footprint join for the centroid-edge fix — replace point-in-polygon with footprint-overlap to catch BPC / Tribeca cases.
2. Doc-message emitter for doe_school_<loc_code>.
3. DOE Sandy-recovery citations layer.
4. MapLibre rendering of school points, color by Sandy/DEP.
5. Far Rockaway + Howard Beach validation runs — most Sandy-affected DOE clusters citywide.
6. Hollis silence test (available=False, n_schools=0).
7. FSM wiring under step_doe_schools parallel-fanout.

Sharp edges encountered

• Non-breaking spaces in school addresses. NYC DOE export encodes   between street number and direction in some addresses ("2840 WEST  12 STREET"). Cosmetic; safe to leave for now, or .replace(" ", " ") if it bites the reconciler's prose rendering.
• Battery Park City false-negatives above are a real limitation worth documenting — and a strong argument for the PLUTO join upgrade in the follow-up.

License: NYC DOE Locations is NYC OD (Open Data Terms of Use); Sandy / DEP / 3DEP all already-used civic-tech-clean public data.