1. PreK-12 school district spending disclosures across the U.S. vary widely in terms of transparency, standardization, and timing. This creates challenges for suppliers, investors, and advocacy groups, who need to navigate a maze of disparate sources to piece together financial insights. Burbio's recently launched PreK-12 Intelligence Hub features state grants, school board documents, strategic plans, checkbook registers, and more, and allows for mapping and alerts to identify key developments. This week we are introducing a searchable database of district operating budgets and capital spending plans.
One of the challenges of organizing these documents is the variety of formats and disclosure levels that occurs across all 50 states. Let’s begin by examining the types of disclosures for annual operating budgets:
Standardized State Formats: Some states require districts to follow specific formats for posting budgets, such as this example from New Jersey’s Woodbridge Township School District.
These standardized formats are often supplemented with additional financial presentations and narratives, as seen in districts like California’s Twin Rivers Unified School District, which, like many California districts, provides detailed descriptions alongside the state-mandated budget format.
For suppliers working with academic services, stand-alone budget reports can be hard to assess, as they often contain only broad accounting categories like "instructional materials" or "technology." While these line items provide some insight, they rarely offer the specifics needed to understand district-level initiatives. This is where narrative descriptions are valuable, as they frequently outline expenditures in key academic areas and provide details on purchased services.
The second type of reporting is capital spending plans. Formats include:
For companies involved in capital projects, both the financial data and the accompanying narratives are valuable. The financial reports typically include detailed line items—such as “Playgrounds,” “Classroom Furniture,” and “Vehicle Fleet”—which outline specific investments. Occasionally, districts also specify curriculum-related purchases in these capital plans.
The following maps display mentions of some of the terms we see in our dataset of budgets and capital plans covering 60% of K-12. We start with academic areas mentioned in budgets from last fiscal year and this current year.
First a national map of MTSS and related terms:
Next a national map of STEM and STEAM:
The final academic area is tutoring:
The major takeaway from the three maps above is that even as school operating budget financial statements hold few insights for curriculum and academic service providers, the narrative descriptions provided by many districts can be very helpful to discover immediate opportunities.
Conversely, for equipment and construction-related industries, operating and capital budgets provide helpful detail across all reporting formats. Here is an example of a map of mentions of Chromebooks from New Jersey and Connecticut:
Below is an image of furniture mentions in Florida:
And below is an overview of HVAC mentions for California, Oregon, and Washington:
2. School districts across the U.S. post checkbook registers that detail payments to specific suppliers. While this information is not universally disclosed, Burbio's database includes districts from over 40 states, representing more than 30% of PreK-12 students. The disclosures can vary in detail, but in general list out checks written to everyone from large textbook publishers to the local bakery. Clients use the information to track competitive activity, pricing trends, and market dynamics.
This week we are sharing a market penetration analysis for select vendors. The following chart highlights the supplier name and the percentage of districts in our database with a payment to the supplier in question at least once during the twelve month period from July 2023 to June 2024: