School contact layer¶

The school contact layer represents all of the pairwise connections between people in schools, including both students and teachers. Schools are special in that:

Enrollment rates by age determine the probability of individual being a student given their age.
Staff members such as teachers are chosen from individuals determined to be in the adult labor force.
The current methods in SynthPops treat student and worker status as mutually exclusive. Many young adults may be both students and workers, part time or full time in either status. The ability to select individuals to participate in both activities will be introduced in a later version of the model.

Data needed¶

The following data is required for schools:

School size distribution:

school_size , percent
0-50        , 0.2
51-100      , 0.1
101-300     , 0.3

Enrollment by age specifying the percentage of people of each age attending school. See get_school_enrollment_rates(), but note that this mainly implements parsing a Seattle-specific data file to produce the following data structure, which could equivalently be read directly from a file:
```
age , percent
0   , 0
1   , 0
2   , 0
3   , 0.529
4   , 0.529
5   , 0.95
6   , 0.95
7   , 0.95
8   , 0.95
9   , 0.95
10  , 0.987
11  , 0.987
12  , 0.987
13  , 0.987
```

School contact matrix specifying the number/weight of contacts by age bin. This is similar to the household contact matrix. For example:

        0-10        , 10-20       , 20-30
0-10    0.659867911 , 0.503965302 , 0.214772978
10-20   0.314776879 , 0.895460015 , 0.412465791
20-30   0.132821425 , 0.405073038 , 1.433888594

Employment rates by age, which is used when determining who is in the labor force, and thus which adults are available to be chosen as teachers:
```
Age , Percent
16  , 0.496
17  , 0.496
18  , 0.496
19  , 0.496
20  , 0.838
21  , 0.838
22  , 0.838
```
Student teacher ratio, which is the average ratio for the location. Methods to use a distribution or vary the ratio for different types of schools may come in later developments of the model:
```
student_teacher_ratio=30
```

Typically, contact matrices describing age-specific mixing patterns in schools include the interactions between students and their teachers. These patterns describe multiple types of schools, from possibly preschools to universities.

Workflow¶

Use these SynthPops functions to implement the school contact layer as follows:

get_uids_in_school() uses the enrollment rates to determine which people attend school. This then provides the number of students needing to be assigned to schools.
generate_school_sizes() generates schools according to the school size distribution until there are enough places for every student to be assigned a school.
send_students_to_school() assigns specific students to specific schools.
- This function is similar to households in that a reference student is selected, and then the contact matrix is used to fill the remaining spots in the school.
- Some particulars in this function deal with ensuring a teacher/adult is less likely to be selected as a reference person, and restricting the age range of sampled people relative to the reference person so that a primary school age reference person will result in the rest of the school being populated with other primary school age children
get_uids_potential_workers() selects teachers by first getting a pool of working age people that are not students.
get_workers_by_age_to_assign() further filters this population by employment rates resulting in a collection of people that need to be assigned workplaces.
In assign_teachers_to_work(), for each school, work out how many teachers are needed according to the number of students and the student-teacher ratio, and sample those teachers from the pool of adult workers. A minimum and maximum age for teachers can be provided to select teachers from a specified range of ages (this can be used to account for the additional years of education needed to become a teacher in many places).