The formation of mega-clusters of schools with coverage criteria. A case study in the town of Castelo Branco

The polemic fusion of the Schools in mega-clusters has been the focus of many stakeholders in the process, interested mainly in understanding the underlying criteria to this merger. In Castelo Branco there were four groups taking the name of the school that became their headquarters: Afonso de Paiva, Faria de Vasconcelos, Cidade de Castelo Branco and João Roiz. Out of this process there were two secondary schools in the city: Nuno Alvares and Amato Lusitano. These schools were georeferenced in the city road network, previously scanned. The ArcGIS software and Network Analyst extension were used. They allowed addressing the issue of the formation of mega-clusters by analyzing the network, namely by solving coverage problems with time and distance criteria. Heuristically, a found solution consisted in grouping three schools belonging to the west axis of the city and in the creation of a second mega-group for the remaining three schools. This solution presents a balanced distribution of the school population, since the difference between these two mega-groups corresponds to about 2% of the total population.