This week's Tracker covers the growth in artificial intelligence discussions in school board meetings and strategic plans, while breaking down major investment areas in school bonds.
1. Burbio's School Board Meeting Tracker captures school board meeting minutes which document policy discussions impacting local districts. Clients use the data for targeted outreach and discussion with potential customers, using alerts and customized reporting to optimize outreach. Burbio can chart trends over time as we began collecting this data two years ago.
With the growth of AI in education, this week we look at the change in AI-related topics in school board meeting minutes since the Spring of 2023. The chart below indicates the percentage of school boards that discussed artificial intelligence at least once during the period:
Board discussions include references to a number of areas:
The absolute percentage of references in board meetings are lower than we would have expected, but we anticipate it to increase. We will be continuing to monitor in future Trackers.
2. Burbio's datasets include strategic plans for school districts across the country and LCAPs for districts in California. Strategic plans are issued by districts every 3-5 years, while LCAPs are issued annually. Below is a chart showing the percent of districts discussing AI broken out by plan year. LCAPs mention AI at the same rate as non-LCAPs, so we have bundled them into the 2024 figures: 
A top subject in strategic plans is professional development for use of AI in the classroom. Other subject areas include course development, use of AI tools more broadly in the classroom, AI-enabled tutoring, and initiatives to reimagine classroom learning using AI.
3. Burbio has recently expanded our dataset to include school bonds, available via a sortable dashboard, a searchable keyword map, and as part of each District Profile. Our bond dataset features such elements as bond amount, coverage summary, vote date, approval status, and document links.
In addition to bonds that have recently passed we track bonds that are up for consideration in the future. Below is a list of the percentage of bonds that reference key terminology going back to 2022: 
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