MAPLE HEIGHTS, Ohio (WJW) — Maple Heights Milkovich Middle School sixth-grade honor students found errors on a map they used in class. Now, their corrections will be used in the next edition of the map!

“I’m happy that they are changing the map and excited that our work will be presented to the world,” said Dream Horton, a sixth-grader who worked on the project. “I’m proud of our class that we could have a big impact and that we could work with the map company in Canada.”

Julie Hogan’s Social Studies class learned to identify the relative location of places using cardinal directions in September. When the class used a Rand McNally road map for the lessons, the students noticed the Maple Heights City School District school buildings were never updated. So, they reached out to the cartography company.

The students sent the company the names, addresses, and the latitude and longitude of each school building.

“Using a photocopy of the portion of the map that covers Maple Heights, Ohio, the students indicated which schools are no longer in the locations that appear on the map. They also provided a spreadsheet with the names of our current schools, addresses, and GPS coordinates,” said Hogan. “The students were excited to share this with Mr. Guy Johnson at GM Johnson Maps.”

“So, people won’t make the same mistake, and they’ll actually have a map that actually is accurate to now because a lot of changes can happen in a couple of years,” sixth grader Micháel Davis said.

The edits will be incorporated into the next edition of the Cleveland map, which is scheduled to be in circulation around September 9, 2023.