Five Neighborhoods · Dane County, Wisconsin

One county. One school district. One hundred and twenty-five neighborhoods that are not the same place.

In Madison, a child's odds of reaching school are set less by their family than by their block — by bus schedules, rent, and how far the nearest clinic is. This atlas maps where those odds diverge, and tells you how sure it is of every number.

Begin

Nearly one in three Madison public-school students misses more than a tenth of the school year. The district's chronic-absence rate — 29.6 percent — is rated "High" by the state. But that number is an average, and averages hide the geography underneath them.

The Equity Atlas folds ten measures of a neighborhood — income, race, transit, housing cost, health-care access, eviction, and more — into a single Neighborhood Attendance Risk Index, tract by tract, across all 125 of Dane County's census tracts. This is the first of five neighborhoods it maps: not to rank them, but to show what the highest-risk block in the county looks like at 6:40 on a Tuesday morning — and where, honestly, the data runs out.

The household below is a composite. The neighborhood is real — Census Tract 30.02, on Madison's near south side. Every figure is real and sourced, and each carries a confidence tier from T1 (measured directly here) to T5 (an indirect proxy). The family is an archetype drawn from the tract's actual conditions, not a specific household. The numbers are not invented.

Neighborhood One

The Reyes household

Near south side · Tract 30.02 · NARI 100th percentile · the highest-risk tract in Dane County

Dolores Reyes wakes at 5:40. Her shift on the overnight cleaning crew ends at seven, and her son needs to be at his elementary school by eight. Fourteen bus stops sit inside their census tract — but during the morning peak, a bus comes past their corner about once every forty-eight minutes. The atlas scores the tract's transit access at 1.9 out of 10. If the 7:12 is late, there is no 7:20. There is a 7:57, and by then the first bell has rung.

She is not, by the federal definition, poor. The tract's median household income is $55,482 a year. But a quarter of her neighbors are — the poverty rate here is 26.1 percent — and the neighborhood carries the county's heaviest load of structural risk: a transit desert, a full federal triple health-care shortage — primary, mental, and dental — and an eviction-filing rate half again above the county's. The nearest federally-qualified clinic is 1.6 miles away; there are none within a mile. When her older child's anxiety flares, the wait for a therapist who takes her insurance runs months, and on the worst mornings he stays home.

Each of those pressures is measured, and each one lands on a child trying to get to school. What the atlas cannot tell you is the one thing you most want to know.

Where the data runs out

In Tract 30.02 the school-attendance rate is — suppressed. Too few students in this tract attend any one school for the state to report the figure without risking a child's privacy. So here is the shape of it: we can measure the pressure on this neighborhood down to the minute the bus arrives. We cannot, honestly, tell you what that pressure produces.

That blank is not a hole in the atlas's rigor. It is the rigor. The highest-risk neighborhood in the county is the one where the outcome is hardest to see — and an honest map says so, rather than filling the space with a guess.

Research question

Does transit access predict whether children get to school?

Honestly, the direct link is weak — across 51 schools the atlas finds a correlation of just −0.05 between bus frequency and chronic absence, and it fades once you account for income. The sharper story is one of deserts, not gradients: 31 tracts in the county have no bus stop at all, and it is those neighborhoods — Tract 30.02 among the thinnest-served — where families run out of options on a late morning.

1.25
Buses per hour in this tract, AM peak T1 · measured
31
Dane County tracts with zero bus stops
1.9
Transit-access score, 0–10

Sources: Madison Metro Transit GTFS, 2026 T1; Atlas transit-absence analysis (RQ 2.1), 51 schools, Pearson r = −0.05.2

Research question

Does housing instability show up in attendance?

It does. Across the district, schools in high-housing-cost tracts run a chronic-absence rate of 30.4 percent, against 22.9 percent where costs are lower — a 7.5-point gap. Tract 30.02's own eviction-filing rate, 3.2 per 100 renter households, sits well above the county's 2.06, and every filing that forces a move is a stretch of school days a child loses to the move itself.

3.2
Eviction filings per 100 renters here T3 · 2015–17
7.5pp
Absence gap: high- vs low-cost tracts
2.06
County-average filing rate, for scale

Sources: U.S. Census ACS 2024, Table B25106 T2; Princeton Eviction Lab, 2015–17 T3; Atlas housing-absence analysis (RQ 2.3), r = 0.20.3

What would help

The gap here is not fare — it is frequency and proximity. Madison already runs need-based student bus passes and universal summer passes; what Tract 30.02 lacks is a bus that comes often enough to rely on, a clinic inside a mile, and before-school care its parents can reach. MMSD opened behavioral-health clinics in all four comprehensive high schools in 2023–24 — a real investment, but one that reaches the student already showing up, not the one who has stopped. Common Wealth Development manages 165 affordable units in and around tracts like this one; stable housing is attendance infrastructure.

If these levers were pulled

Each of these has been measured, in real programs, on real students:

  • Free, frequent transit: Minneapolis's GoTo student-pass program cut absenteeism 23%; a Michigan/MIT study found expanding bus eligibility cut chronic absence about 4 points for disadvantaged students.
  • Services inside the building: California's $4.1B Community Schools program co-located childcare, health, and family services in schools and posted 30% larger absence reductions than comparison schools.
  • Neighborhood stability: the Moving to Opportunity experiment found children who reached a lower-poverty neighborhood before age 13 were 32% more likely to attend college — the effect of the block, not the effort.

Sources & confidence

  1. Tract 30.02 profile (GEOID 55025003002), Madison Equity Data atlas: NARI 100.0 (highest of 125 Dane County tracts); poverty rate 26.1% and median household income $55,482 (U.S. Census ACS 2024 5-Year, T2); population 3,619, of whom ~36% are people of color; renter cost burden 8.3%; uninsured 7.3%. School-attendance rate suppressed (null) in the source data.
  2. Transit: Madison Metro Transit GTFS feed, 2026-03-25 (T1 — measured directly): 14 stops in-tract, mean 1.25 trips/hour at AM peak, 0% frequent-service stops, access score 1.9/10. Atlas RQ 2.1 (transit-absence), 51 schools, Pearson r = −0.05; not significant after controlling for income; 31 county tracts have zero stops.
  3. Housing: eviction filings 3.2 per 100 renter households (Princeton Eviction Lab, 2015–2017 average, T3); county average 2.06. Cost burden from ACS 2024 Table B25106 (T2). Atlas RQ 2.3 (housing-absence), 51 schools: high-cost-burden tracts mean chronic absence 30.4% vs 22.9% below the median, a 7.5-point gap, r = 0.20.
  4. Health: HRSA Health Professional Shortage Area designations, 2026-Q1 — Tract 30.02 carries all three (primary care, mental health, dental). Zero federally-qualified health centers within one mile; nearest is the William T. Evjue Clinic at 1.61 miles.
  5. Interventions: Minneapolis GoTo evaluation (23% reduction); Michigan/MIT bus-eligibility regression-discontinuity (~4pp); California Community Schools Partnership Program, Learning Policy Institute (30%); Chetty, Hendren & Katz, "Moving to Opportunity," American Economic Review 2016 (32% more likely to attend college). District chronic-absence 29.6%: WISEdash certified 2024–25.

Four more neighborhoods · then the map

You've read one block. The atlas holds a hundred and twenty-five.

See them all →