I am working on a high school project located in Seattle. The school serves a predominantly black student population in a historically underserved neighborhood. The attendance boundary for the school includes about 10 different census tracts. The problem I am having is that the census tract the school site is inside of includes a wealthy lakefront area to the north, which skews the data. The school sits on the southern border of the tract. In this tract, the median income is 94% of the area median income. The census tract to the south, directly across the street from the school, has a median income 50% of the AMI which is more representative of the student population. If the tract boundary was one block north, the school would be inside the tract with the lower median income. What I want to propose in submitting for this credit is to include all the census tracts in the school's attendance boundary and provide the median income, which comes to 77% of AMI and qualifies for the credit. This is a slight departure from the technical wording of the credit, but I feel it meets the intent.

Has anyone used a similar approach and was it successful?