1. As part of Burbio's service, clients can create territory filters for each individual user. For example, a sales executive who covers three states will have a filtered view of data (board meetings, checkbooks, strategic plans, etc) from just those three states. Similarly, an executive prioritizing the top 500 districts in the US can have a filter for just those districts. Territories can be defined by state, district NCES, county, or district enrollment.
These filtered views can reveal regional differences. The maps below show examples for districts in any stage of purchasing SEL curriculum. On the left, a Northeast territory (Connecticut through New Hampshire) shows signals from the last few months, indicated by dots. On the right, a Southeast territory (Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, Mississippi, and Alabama) shows the same timeframe and question, highlighting noticeably lower activity compared with the Northeast.
Further below we do the same analysis for a question about mental health services.
2. Burbio maintains a database of district checkbook registers covering over 20 million PreK-12 students. Information is searchable to the district level, and clients use the data for competitive intelligence and market analysis. This week we take a look at the percentage of districts writing checks to OpenAI/ChatGPT over the last eight quarters:
It’s important to note that OpenAI offers free versions of its service, and while districts report the vast majority of vendor payments, very small payments may fall below disclosure thresholds. Individual users making payments on their own would also not appear in these reports. As a result, the figures above should be viewed as directional (e.g., usage doubling in twelve months) rather than a complete measure of overall usage.
This dynamic of vendors offering freemium versions of AI-tools, plus embedding AI enablement into their longstanding K-12 services, makes AI spending tricky to measure in the immediate term. We expect the ability to track district spending in this area will improve as more services are introduced and districts expand usage to fully paid plans.
3. Using the territory filter approach noted above, here is a second example, using the same territories with a question about districts being in any stage of considering mental health services. The Northeast map is on the left, the Southeast on the right. In this example both territories have plenty of activity:
4. Burbio's Signals Tracker analyzes school district reporting to find answers to specific questions, and provides a summary of the discussion with links to source documents. Clients across many categories focus on new school construction and the need to be a part of the district process at the earliest stages, before construction actually begins. Here are some early-stage signals from the last few weeks:
5. Last week Burbio introduced a dataset of RFPs, adding to our existing datasets of state grants, school board meeting minutes, strategic plans, bonds, superintendent turnover, and more. RFPs are presented in a sortable dashboard with information such as RFP category, Due Date, RFP title, Bid ID, District name and NCES. Clients will receive alerts when relevant RFPs appear. Below are some RFPs from across the country over the last few days: