After deciding to close one of its middle schools, the Springfield school board needs to reassign all of next year’s middle school students to the three remaining middle schools. Many of the students will be bused, so minimizing the total busing cost is one objective. Another is to minimize the inconvenience and safety concerns for the students who will walk or bicycle to school. Given the capacities of the three schools, as well as the need to roughly balance the number of students in the three grades at each school, how can linear programming be used to determine how many students from each of the city’s six residential areas should be assigned to each school? What would happen if each entire residential area must be assigned to the same school?