Week of 8/29: Percent Spent
This week we look at the percent of ESSER III funding spent by districts across fifteen states, plus school security initiatives
In this week's Tracker we cover trends in security initiatives, a range of infrastructure spending available from state grants, and map a variety of educational initiatives across school board meetings, strategic plans and checkbook registers.
1. Burbio compiles strategic plans and LCAPs covering over 70% of the U.S. public school population. Clients can identify districts that are prioritizing relevant investments through document keyword searches and receive custom alerts when signals appear. This week we look at references to school security, a growing segment of PreK-12:
- For this analysis we restricted searches to districts that have issued strategic plans in 2022, 2023, and 2024 to best capture post-Covid priorities.
- The chart below indicates the percent of plans where the relevant term appears at least once.
2. Burbio's State-Level Funding Tracker features continuously updated, state-specific grants for PreK-12 schools. Burbio has identified over 1,000 grants covering over $30 billion in spending.
Facilities grants can be used by a wide variety of industry verticals involved in the upkeep and expansion of public schools, and feature large funding amounts. They are often offered from outside the state department of education. Below are some examples from across the country:
- In Alaska, the state offers Capital Improvement Grants to districts with six-year plans in place that meet a variety of administrative requirements. Recently awarded projects cover everything from entire new school buildings to roof and exterior repairs, pool repairs, HVAC upgrades, kitchen updates, security system installation, locker room updates, and many more.
- In Washington, the Urgent Repair Grants "are solely for addressing (non-recurring) urgent small repair projects at K-12 public schools" and can be as large as $500,000.
- We see many states offering infrastructure grants for charter schools, and one example is the Iowa Charter Start Up and Expansion Grant Opportunity. It is offered to both new and existing charter schools in the state and can range from $200,000 to $500,000 per award.
- In West Virginia the Building Authority Major Improvement Projects (MIP) Grants are "designed to address major improvements in existing facilities that are not fundable through the local maintenance budgets" and range from $50,000 to $1 million.
- In Pennsylvania the Public School Facility Improvement Grant, from the Department of Community and Economic Development, covers a variety of construction costs for districts across the state.
3. Burbio's PreK-12 Intelligence Hub hosts Burbio's database of state grants, school board meeting documents, strategic plans, checkbook registers and more, and allows for district-level investigation through customized alerts and analysis of trends through visualizations.
In our Tracker from August 20th we illustrated the increase in school board meeting mentions of newcomer and related terms. This week we map it. Below is a map of school board references to migrant, immigrants, and newcomers between March of 2023 (when we launched our board document initiative) and December 31st, 2023: 
The following is a map of references to those same terms in board meetings between January 1st and the end of August 2024. References have doubled during the comparison periods:
In the live version of the mapping dashboard a rollover allows for the clicking on map dots and investigating district documentation.
The PreK-12 Intelligence Hub maps other datasets as well. Below is a map of references to CTE in strategic plans that have been issued since 2022 across Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Virginia and Tennessee. 
Finally, our spending document dataset represents districts from just over 30% of PreK-12 students that publish detailed check register accounts with names of suppliers and amounts paid. This ranges from distributors and manufacturers to the local bakery. It provides for some intereesting competitive analysis.
In Texas we gather district registers from over 40% of the student population. By example, below is a map showing all districts who have recently written checks to Curriculum Associates.
