Open attendance means nothing if you don't have transportation.

Again, it's about economics. Not every parent that sends their kids to school has the money to pay for their kid to travel across town to go to a different one. Many will attend the closest school because they literally can't afford to send them anywhere else.

There's a lot more to consider when drawing attendance lines than simple numbers. What about locations of housing projects and/or assistance housing? Racial and ethnic makeup?

And regarding Skyline - kids go to Skyline because kids go to Skyline. Every school in both AISD and DISD are "choice" schools and kids can choose which school to attend. Kids that think they're going to be athletes go to Skyline because it achieves notoriety due to its school size and usual athletic success - much more so than many other DISD schools.

There are also what are basically magnet programs at virtually every comprehensive high school in DISD. Their effect on enrollment campus to campus is virtually nil - if every school admits 100-150 freshmen into their magnet programs, they all still wind up with the same amount of freshmen.

Finally, regarding the hour bus ride - part of what happened in Houston was that a school designated for closure would have sent kids to the next closest school on a map, but that school was over capacity - so they had to go to the next closest school in the *other* direction, which would have forced kids to cross a major highway intersection if they walked to school. Since that wasn't feasible, they would have had to be bused, and the buses pick up an hour or more earlier than the kids would have had to leave school to walk to the original campus.

It's never as simple as lines on a map. This is why school boards hire people to do this research for them.