Aging school infrastructure, changing population dynamics, decreased funding, and increased accountability for reporting school success all require today's school business officials to combine a variety of disparate data sets into a coherent system that enables effective and efficient decision making. School business officials are required to: (1) Plan for change; (2) Monitor patterns and trends in land use, housing, and population characteristics; (3) Make decisions and allocate resources for service delivery and costs; (4) Negotiate agreements with city, county, and state officials; and (5) Communicate with school board members, parents, students, and members of the community about changes, contentious issues, and district policies. A geographic information system (GIS) does all of these things by integrating the hardware, software, and data for capturing, managing, analyzing, and displaying all forms of geographically referenced information. GIS allows one to view, understand, question, interpret, and visualize data in many ways that reveal relationships, patterns, and trends in the form of maps, globes, reports, and charts. At the core of the GIS is a powerful relational database management system. This makes it possible to query the data points based on the various fields (attributes in GIS) found in the data. School business officials can view these data points in a variety of ways. Using GIS, school business officials can integrate their data with the data of the local homeland security agencies, providing information about building floor plans, classroom schedules, and high resolution aerial photos--all of which can prove important in a crisis situation when officials need to know where people are during an emergency. (Contains 4 figures.)