georgiacivicdata

georgiacivicdata brings Georgia's public data into Python. It is the Python client for the API run by Georgia Civic Data.

Georgia Civic Data gathers, organizes, and standardizes Georgia's public data, helping residents, parents, researchers, and professionals find answers in data that is already theirs. Every dataset has the same shape, with the same codes for counties, school districts, schools and demographic groups, so datasets from different agencies can be compared and joined.

The data covers education, Census, health, and immigration, from the whole state down to single schools and Census tracts. Each dataset comes with a data contract that documents its source, its columns, and the limits of the data.

With georgiacivicdata you can:

• Find Georgia datasets, read their documentation, and get rows, all from Python.
• Get pandas or Polars data frames with consistent column types: codes stay text so leading zeros survive, years are integers, and rates are proportions between 0 and 1.
• See every school, district, and county code with its name, and filter by name instead of code.
• Get school attendance zones and district boundaries as geopandas GeoDataFrames, ready to map.
• Look up the schools zoned for any Georgia address.

There is no API key and nothing to configure. The package mirrors the R package georgiacivicdata: the same functions, without the gcd_ prefix.

Installation

Install the package from PyPI:

pip install georgiacivicdata

Extras add Polars and geopandas:

pip install "georgiacivicdata[polars,geo]"

Or install the development version from GitHub:

pip install "georgiacivicdata @ git+https://github.com/shanejorr/georgia-data-pypackage"

Example: graduation rates in Fulton County

How has the high school graduation rate in Fulton County Schools changed over time? The usual workflow:

import georgiacivicdata as gcd

# 1. Find a dataset by plain words
gcd.search("high school graduation", n=5)[["name", "title", "year_min", "year_max"]]

# 2. Learn what is in it
gcd.columns("graduation_rate_4_year_cohort")[["column", "type", "role", "unit"]]
gcd.describe("graduation_rate_4_year_cohort")  # source, years, notes

# 3. Get the rows: names turn into codes for you
grads = gcd.rows(
    "graduation_rate_4_year_cohort",
    district="Fulton County",
    detail="districts",
    demographic=["all", "black", "hispanic", "white"],
    year=range(2011, 2026),
)

# 4. Plot the overall rate
grads[grads["demographic"] == "all"].plot(x="year", y="graduation_rate")

# 5. Cite it
gcd.citation(grads)

Each place comes back with both its code and its name. A missing value usually means the figure was suppressed to protect small groups, not that it is zero. The API's advisories arrive as GCDAdvisory warnings: for example, never add the all total to its subgroups.

pandas or Polars

pandas is the default. Ask for Polars per call, or for the session:

gcd.rows("employment", year=2024, backend="polars")
gcd.set_option("backend", "polars")

Lookup tables

Everything known about a place beyond its name lives in lookup tables: a school's level, locale, grade span, address and coordinates, a tract's population. gcd.dimension() returns one:

gcd.dimension("schools", district="Fulton County", school_level="high", active=True)

School zones and places

zones = gcd.school_zones(district="Atlanta Public Schools", zone_level="high")
zones.plot(column="school_name")

# The Georgia State Capitol: its county, tract, district and zoned schools
gcd.locate(address="206 Washington St SW, Atlanta, GA 30334")

Addresses are geocoded on your computer with the U.S. Census geocoder, so only the point reaches the Georgia Civic Data API.

Documentation

• Package website: https://georgiacivicdata.org/py/
• Every page also has a Markdown version for LLM agents: add .md to its address, or start at https://georgiacivicdata.org/py/llms.txt.
• API documentation: https://georgiacivicdata.org/docs

Data license and citation

The data is published under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license (CC BY 4.0): credit Georgia Civic Data and the original source. gcd.citation() writes the citation for any result. The package code is MIT-licensed.