K-12
Burbio School Tracker 2/4: Regional Differences
This week we look at differences in school board meeting topics across separate regions, examine use of DEI terminology by districts in light of...
In this week's Tracker we present analysis demonstrating the locale-based differences (City, Suburban, Town, Rural) in school board discussions covering a range of purchasing, instruction, and school culture categories. More below.
1. Burbio uses AI to capture intent signals from a wide-range of district-level documents, and clients use the data across marketing and sales to engage districts and uncover insights and funding opportunities through alerts, mapping, and CRM integration. Our School Board Meeting Tracker captures and continually updates school board meetings across the PreK-12 school population.
This week we evaluate differences in the prevalence of industry terms by district locale in board minutes. Note that City and Suburban districts tend to be bigger than Town and Rural districts, so references overall are higher in those districts as board meetings cover more subjects. That said, the differences are more pronounced in some areas than others. Charts show the percentage of school districts that mention the referenced term at least once during calendar 2024.
We will start by highlighting areas that are widely mentioned in all locales - CTE, Early Childhood, and Special Education - and are only slightly less-covered in Town and Rural Districts:
2. Terms related to school culture vary more widely. Below is a combined chart showing the differences in references to Equity, Diversity, and DEI by district locale with pronounced differences between City/Suburb and Town/Rural:
Chronic absenteeism is also much more frequently discussed in City and Suburban districts:
3. Next up are some instruction related terms. Here are STEM/STEAM/Robotics references. We note the frequency of robotics references; our data is filled with highly specific references to science and CTE education, and robotics is just one example of that:
Tutoring references, while not quite as consistent across locales as terms like special education and CTE, do appear relatively frequently:
As you might guess, ELL and Newcomer references are more frequent in City and Suburban districts:
4. In our final section we shift to equipment and infrastructure terms. First, HVAC appears widely across the board:
Finally, school security discussions appear less in the absolute than other discussions, and are much more prevalent in City and Suburban districts than Town and Rural:
