“As a favor to a friend” Isn’t that how all these things start out?
The Illinois State Board of Education has long since stopped making school districts maps for each district. So, when a retiring superintendent asked for an updated map for the new incoming administrator, there are not a lot of options. Definitely nothing that a struggling rural school district could actually pay for.

The request actually came by way of ILGISA, our state GIS association, of which I am on the board. I snatched it up as a first pass for this newly formed non profit organization, also, the Fieldcrest High School principal is a good friend of mine…kind of a ‘small world’ thing.

It looks a lot like the ISBE map from 2003, which should be taken as a cartographic compliment. In total, I probably spent 5 hours on it, but don’t exactly know. How refreshing.

Later, I made this Map. It is focused and zoomed in on just Fieldcrest:

If you look close on the PDF (linked from the image above) you can see the micro$oft building footprint layer.