1. Late last month NCES (National Center for Education Statistics) published their enrollments for the 2023-24 school year. Below is a list of the enrollment change versus 2019/20 (the year before Covid-19 disrupted in-person education) of all 50 states plus the District of Columbia. The overall decline across the period is 2.6%:
It is important to note that NCES figures can differ slightly from those that the states report themselves due to differing methodologies. At the bottom of this email we show the state-by-state change versus 2022-23, which featured a national decline of 0.2%.
2. Later this month Burbio is adding school bond data to our PreK-12 Intelligence Hub, which currently features state grants, school board meeting minutes, strategic plans, checkbook registers, superintendent turnover, and capex and operating budgets.
School bond information will be available via a sortable dashboard, a searchable keyword map, and as part of each District Profile. Our bond dataset features such elements as bond amount, coverage summary, vote date, approval status, document links, and more.
The largest spending categories of school bonds include areas such as construction, HVAC, energy efficiency, playgrounds, athletic fields, furniture, and equipment. As we launch the dataset we want to highlight some additional areas of spending that have material impact for key verticals in the industry:
Clients will receive customized alerts, and be able to view bond data on a customized district profile that combines the data with all other district level documents and can be easily integrated into CRM systems. Having all this information in one place gives a complete picture of district planning and spending priorities.
3. The most important individual in setting district policy is the district Superintendent, and Burbio's Superintendent Turnover Tracker measures changes in that role nationwide and provides alerts when openings occur. Tracking includes:
This week we examine the percentage of districts that hire internal candidates broken down by district size. This analysis covers over 600 districts that have replaced their Superintendents since announcing openings going back just over a year. Counts in the size categories range from a low of 36 districts (Very Large) to well over 100 searches for the Small, Medium Small, and Medium Districts.
Internal candidates are hired at a rate that ranges from 30.6% to 52.2%, with the highest percentages in the larger districts. Across all 600+ districts the average was just under 40%:
4. Below is a chart showing state-by-state enrollment changes versus last year. National enrollment decline was 0.2%: