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Gaskin and Associates Consulting Group, LLC
NNPS proposal
October 8 2026
35
Evidence for optimizing several goals together
Guan and colleagues’ 2025 Winston-Salem/Forsyth County study jointly modeled school boundaries
with travel, socioeconomic integration, feeders and compactness. In its middle-school comparison, the
uniform-weight multi-objective case reduced average modeled driving distance from 3.35 to 3.07
miles, dissimilarity from 0.57 to 0.53 and feeder splits from 38 to about 32; approximately 22.23% of
students were rezoned. [S50, Table 3b]
Tradeoffs remained. Its elementary multi-objective case increased feeder splits from 59 to about 63.
These were computational draft scenarios, not measured post-implementation benefits or NNPS
forecasts. Most tested cases did not prove global optimality within the ten-hour limit; nonoptimal
results summarize 30 runs. Driving distance is not a measured bus journey. [S50, Table 3 and
experimental settings]
How to transfer the method responsibly
Lesson for Newport News
Implementation requirement
Search combined choices
Vary program placement, boundaries, staffing and routes together. A fixed
school-host decision can exclude a better joint option.
Expose gains and sacrifices
Show all five NNPS considerations and full cost for each draft. Keep raw
values visible even if a composite score is used.
Represent the full community
Recruit renters, families without cars, language groups and nonapplicants.
Report response coverage; an open meeting vote is not a representative city
survey.
Distinguish mathematical
status
State feasible versus proved optimal, objective, constraints and gap. Validate
every proposed route, section and service outside the optimizer.
Evaluate after implementation
Retain baseline and transition cohorts; compare actual paid cost, travel,
placements, diversity and disruption with the published prediction.
The positive implication is that several goals can sometimes improve together when the search is
broad enough. The feasible NNPS task is to identify those combinations and test the remaining
compromises. Existing public data support the local screens in this report; a final school-specific
solution requires the complete operational inputs and the Board’s explicit policy choices.Jump to an indexed page (48 of 48)