The zoning policy of Indonesia New Student Admission System encourages schools to accept more students from their zoning location. This condition needs to be supported by a good management to ensure that the school facilities suffice the student distribution. School location-allocation optimization problem aims to obtain optimum student distribution such that the total of students travel distance is minimized. This problem is modeled as p-median problem, and can be solved using meta-heuristic approach. In this study, firefly algorithm with two-dimensional firefly individual representation is utilized to solve South Jakarta junior school location-allocation problem. The obtained solution lowers 57.58% of student travel distance compared to the previous condition assuming that favorite schools are tend to be chosen by students. © 2019 Published under licence by IOP Publishing Ltd.