1. Burbio’s Signals Tracker analyzes and summarizes millions of pages of district school board discussions, surfacing insights that range from highly specific, immediately actionable purchasing signals to broader strategic themes. An important area of investigation is new school construction, with a particular focus on the early stages of the process where districts decide on specifications and suppliers. We recently reviewed over 1,000 recent board discussions about new school construction and wanted to share what the earliest stages look like:
Preliminary Consideration: This is the earliest stage, when districts recognize a future need but haven't yet committed to a project.
- Boards focus on enrollment analysis, building condition surveys, and demographic studies. These data points justify the eventual need for new space.
- At this stage, districts are debating whether to continue making repairs to aging buildings or build new facilities, while exploring property acquisition and forming facilities committees.
- Districts are looking for data to present to their communities to build support for funding.
Active Evaluation: The "Design & Professional Selection" Stage: When districts select their professional partners and define the project scope.
- The board approves registered architects and executes contracts for services. They are also deciding on construction delivery methods, such as Construction Manager at Risk (CMAR) or Design-Build.
- Districts evaluate building configurations, such as deciding between one larger K-8 school or two smaller elementary schools. They also begin making design and pricing decisions
- Districts are heavily focused on bond planning here reviewing cost estimates, "3D views" and renderings which help to visualize the project for public hearings and bond votes.
Implementation: Groundbreaking & Logistics: The "what" is largely decided, and the focus shifts to "how" to finish on time and within budget.
- Boards award bids to subcontractors and manage construction change orders. They also discuss the logistics of and boundary changes that will occur once the school opens.
- Final decisions involve furniture, fixtures, and equipment and specialized site needs like geotechnical boring or road improvements.
It is worth noting three areas that came up frequently that often acted as catalysts for school construction: Handling overcrowding and capacity, modernizing security systems through things like access control and security vestibules, and specialized programming such as CTE/STEM Centers, Early Childhood, and athletic facilities.
2. Last week Burbio added dynamically updated district-level contact data (name, title, email address, phone, etc.) to our Intel Hub for all our clients, who can access the data for email campaigns and district outreach. Below, we profile the variety of ways districts designate officials in charge of curriculum and instruction. The chart displays the percent of districts that have individuals with the indicated title:
3. Burbio's State Policy dashboard includes information such as state board meetings, budgets, Title I funds, state AI policies, curriculum lists, and more. Burbio summarizes state board of education meetings and highlights the issues covered. Every month we see a large amount of curriculum-related news. Here are updates from the last six weeks:
- In Maine, a new Numeracy Playbook was introduced. It is designed to provide guidance and tools to help schools and districts strengthen instruction and systems in alignment with the state’s Numeracy Action Plan.
- In North Carolina, the state approved the 2026-27 computer science courses to satisfy graduation requirements for high school and middle school.
- In Mississippi, the state published the list of approved textbooks as recommended by the 2025 State Textbook Rating Committee for adoption in the areas of Health and Physical Education (K-12), Career Technical Education (9-12), and Science (K-12).
- In Alabama, the state approved a report by the State Course of Study Committee on Digital Literacy and Computer Science, which provides a K-12 framework that teaches students computational thinking, data science, computing systems, and digital citizenship.
- In Texas, the state presented new lists of literary works to be taught in each grade level.
- In Connecticut, the state launched a new high school elective, "An American History of Rock and Soul," in conjunction with Stevie Van Zandt's TeachRock initiative.
4. Burbio's State-Level Funding Tracker features billions of dollars of continuously updated, state-specific grants for PreK-12 schools. Professional development is one of the broader grant categories, with grants crossing the spectrum from teacher training and certification to training in specific subject areas. Below are some recent examples:
- Wisconsin's Teacher Training and Recruitment Grant is designed to recruit and prepare individuals to teach in low-income or urban school districts.
- In Minnesota, the Grow Your Own (GYO) Pathway for Adults and Secondary Students is designed to support activities that will increase the number of teachers of color and American Indian teachers in Minnesota.
- In Arizona, the state offers the Dyslexia Training Designee Grant, offering $1 million to help offset the cost of district training.
- In Colorado the The Early Literacy Grant – Professional Development (ELG-PD), provides funding to Local Education Providers (LEPs) to strengthen the knowledge and skills of K-3 educators in evidence-based reading instruction.
- In Wyoming, the Education Trust Fund Grant is designed to create new, innovative, and improved educational opportunities for all grade levels, and includes administrative and staff professional development as one of the programs eligible.
- In Iowa, the STEM Teacher Externship is targeted towards licensed secondary STEM classroom educators and designed to help teachers connect classroom content and skills to the needs of Iowa's STEM workplaces.