Mapping Drug Use in California High Schools ✕

School districts in California are encouraged every year to administer the California Healthy Kids Survey (CHKS) to their 9th and 11th grade students. The survey includes questions about student alcohol or drug (AOD) use. This project uses the response data from these surveys to map the percent of students who have used drugs in their lifetime in each district.

Source code and data

This is an open source project. Code, data, and instructions on how to run it for yourself are on Narlotl/ca-aod on GitHub.

Data

• Percent data from CHKS responses parsed from California Department of Education report files*.
• District boundaries from California School District Areas 2023-24 dataset on the California State Geoportal.

*It is important to interpret these results with caution. Results can be significantly impacted by response rates, the type of parental consent used (passive or active), gender differences, regional variations, and other issues. The CHKS is only one of many data sources.