Burbio School Tracker 9/17: Mapping Priorities

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 information appears.  

CTE and STEM are integral parts of the education landscape and this week we look at the frequency of references in this dataset. 

• For this analysis we restricted searches to districts that have issued strategic plans in 2022, 2023, and 2024 to best capture post-Covid priorities. 
• That portion of the database covers over 2,000 district plans covering over 50% of K-12 students. 
• 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, covering all state departments, as well as Federal grants where states can tailor the criteria. Burbio has identified over 1,000 grants covering over $30 billion in spending. This week we profile grants in early childhood education:

• In Maine, the First Ten Community Schools Pilot "bring(s) together school systems, early childhood programs, and community partners/agencies to improve care and education for young children and their families throughout the first 10 years of children’s lives."
• In Maryland, the Judy Center Early Learning Hub Expansion Grant is "intended to benefit children ages birth to five years old and their families within a specific catchment area. These funds must be utilized to offer comprehensive early care and education services, aiming to enhance child development and school readiness as well as strengthen families."
• A good example of a fast-turnaround grant out of Alabama, tied to expiring ARP funds, is the July 2024 Child Care Stability Grant. "Providers may choose to use the funding in any manner to support the child care facility, including minor remodeling . . . "
• An example of a grant where early childhood is one component is South Carolina's McKinney-Vento Homeless Assistance Act: Education for Homeless Children and Youths, "intended to benefit children ages birth to five years old and their families within a specific catchment area. These funds must be utilized to offer comprehensive early care designed to ensure that each homeless child and youth has equal access to the same free, appropriate public education, including public preschool education, as other children, and youths."
• In Nevada the Early Childhood Innovative Literacy Program "encourages innovative approaches to early childhood education and prioritizes projects that show success in improving literacy and readiness for children under six years of age, as well as those that serve areas with a higher proportion of children in need."

3.  This week Burbio is introducing our PreK-12 Intelligence Hub. The service hosts Burbio's database of state grants, school board meeting documents, strategic plans, CapEx budgets, operating budgets, checkbook registers and more and can be easily integrated into client CRMs. Among the highlights: 

• Dashboard customization for sales regions or accounts based on industry vertical or specialty
• Custom alerts at the district or state level for activity in any of the areas Burbio tracks 
• Reporting Hub - Access to market-level updates and history 
• Keyword Mapping - offers selectors by state, region, and time frame across any document type in our database

This allows for rich analysis of trends in education, in addition to district level insights.  This week we will start with an overview of school board mentions since Q1 in some important industry verticals. 

We start with a state-level view showing Cybersecurity mentions in board meetings in Texas.  Note that in the live, dynamic version of the service, all map points are hot-linked to district level documentation:

Next is view of all mentions of HVAC in school board meeting minutes from Northeastern states:

This is a national view of all school board meetings that mentioned Science of Reading:

Here is another national view, a map of all districts that have mentioned School Security nationwide:

Mapping is just one of the tools in the PreK-12 Intelligence Hub. We'll be able to present expanded analysis of education industry trends using this, and other approaches, in future Trackers.