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 Education and the appropriate State authorities to define the geographic extent of school districts throughout the Nation. The powers, responsibilities, organization, and geographic extent of school districts often vary from State to State, or even locally within a State. To accommodate this situation, the Census Bureau devised an approach that permitted classification of school districts into four categories, each of which could constitute a geographic level in the tabulation scheme. A school district could be unified, or it could consist of component subdivisions of elementary, middle, and secondary school districts (sometimes in varying combinations). To accommodate this situation, the Census Bureau identified school districts in terms of their geographic components—counties, incorporated places, MCDs, census tracts/block numbering areas (BNAs), and census blocks. It then aggregated the statistical data for these component entities by individual school districts.

Other user needs for data summaries for a nonstandard set of geographic entities are met by the User-Defined Areas Program (UDAP). The UDAP permits local data users to delineate the areas of entities (such as neighborhoods, planning districts, or service areas) as combinations of adjacent census blocks, block groups (BGs) or parts of block groups, and census tracts/BNAs or parts of census tracts/BNAs. By participating in the UDAP, data users can obtain statistical summaries for a geographic area or areas that are not otherwise presented in the Census Bureau’s standard data products.

Another new development has been the situation where an incorporated place consolidates its functions with the government of a county or MCD while this same new governmental unit continues to contain other incorporated places. To improve its representation of such entities, the Census Bureau has recognized a new class of entity, the consolidated city. The 1990 census recognizes six such entities, and a seventh is included in the first-time recognition of consolidated cities by the 1992 economic census.

New entities such as those listed above seldom find a straightforward niche within the standard units of the Census Bureau’s geographic hierarchy. To Geographic Overview2-19