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K-12 School Reopening Trends - November 22, 2021

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Burbio's ESSER III Data Basis for Bloomberg Story.

November 11th, 2021- "An analysis of spending plans from about 1,040 school districts in 35 states shows how education officials across the country are preparing to tackle learning loss, mental health, staffing crises and equity concerns exacerbated by multiple years of remote learning and classroom disruption, according to data compiled by Burbio, which has tracked shutdowns during the pandemic."

Burbio featured in NPR piece about quarantines.

October 27th, 2021- "A model called ‘test-to-stay’ has also been gaining wider momentum. That’s where close contacts students aren’t quarantined, but they are tested every day for about a week. Roche says they only go home if they test positive. Several states, including Massachusetts, now have a statewide test-to-stay option."

Burbio featured in NPR piece about mask mandates being lifted.

October 18, 2021- "At least a half dozen school districts across the country have recently lifted their mandates, the first such swing away from the face coverings, according to Burbio, which tracks the developments and runs a dashboard on schools. They include Troup County in Georgia, Rogers Public Schools in Arkansas and Northside ISD in Texas, Burbio reported."

Burbio Featured in Reuters story about Back to School.

September 28, 2021- "Meanwhile, California is nearly nine times the size of Kentucky, with a population of around 40 million. With masks, ventilation and high vaccination rates, the San Francisco and Los Angeles school districts reported zero to few cases in their first few weeks. The state has had fewer than half of the number of school or district closures as Kentucky, according to Burbio."

Burbio data featured in The Wall Street Journal about Rising Child Covid-19 Cases in Opened Schools.

September 5, 2021 - " Since the school year kicked off in late July, at least 1,000 schools across 31 states have closed because of Covid-19, according to Burbio, a Pelham, N.Y., data service that is monitoring school closures"

Burbio data featured on Yahoo News as schools reopen for the new year.

September 1, 2021 - "According to the statistics firm Burbio, which tracks pandemic school trends, of the 700 schools in 158 districts that have already closed this year over COVID concerns, the overwhelming majority are in states like Florida, Texas, Kentucky, Tennessee and Georgia."

Burbio data featured in The New York Times about The Kindergarten Exodus

August 8, 2021 - "The analysis by The New York Times in conjunction with Stanford University shows that in those 33 states, 10,000 local public schools lost at least 20 percent of their kindergartners. . . . . . . . Districts that went strictly remote experienced 42 percent more decline than those that offered full-time in-person learning, according to a new  research paper  by Professor Dee and colleagues, posted Saturday. While some of these schools were losing students before the pandemic, the declines between fall 2019 and fall 2020 were significantly steeper."

Burbio data featured in New Study about the Determining Factors of Returning to In-Person Learning.

July 13, 2021 - "Using data on over 1,100 school district reopening decisions from Burbio.com, Harris and Tulane research fellow Daniel Oliver examined which stayed remote or switched to in-person learning both last fall and in the spring of 2021."

Burbio data featured on Axios about the Post-Covid stickiness of Hybrid school.

July 08, 2021 - "At the end of the 2020–21 school year, only about 2% of K–12 students in the U.S. were attending virtual-only schools, and 70% were in traditional, in-person schools, according to the Burbio School Opening Tracker"

Burbio data featured in CDC MMWR on Disparities in Learning Mode Access Among K–12 Students During the COVID-19 Pandemic.

June 29, 2021 - "In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, schools across the United States began transitioning to virtual learning during spring 2020. However, schools’ learning modes varied during the 2020–21 school year across states as schools transitioned at differing times back to in-person learning, in part reflecting updated CDC guidance. Reduced access to in-person learning is associated with poorer learning outcomes and adverse mental health and behavioral effects in children."

Burbio featured on The 74 about the In-Person Learning Gap Produced by the Politics of Pandemic Schooling

June 9, 2021 - Burbio co-founder Dennis Roche, with help from his data team, has been mapping out learning models across America’s top 460 districts over the past year. Very quickly, partisan trends in reopening became clear to Roche.

Burbio featured on The New York Times Education Briefing

June 9, 2021 - The technology company Burbio has been running its own school tracker. It monitors 1,200 districts, including the 200 largest. Its data says that in general, conservative-leaning states reopened schools faster than liberal-leaning ones. But Democratic areas had strong variation: The Northeast and the Midwest reopened a lot faster than the West Coast, which has the highest concentration of remote learners.

Burbio featured on The 74 with new data on state level mask mandates

May 24, 2021 - The new numbers were released Monday by Burbio, a website that has tracked school reopening policies throughout the pandemic. Except for a handful of states that never enacted school mask mandates at any point during the last year, the scrapping of face covering requirements has come almost exclusively in the past three weeks, said Burbio co-founder Dennis Roche.

Burbio featured on CNBC Squawk Box about April's big jobs miss

May 10, 2021 - Steve Liesman using Burbio data and Bureau of Labor Statistics to discuss school reopening and labor supply shortages.

Burbio featured on Yahoo! News as virtual schooling drops below 10%

Apr 19, 2021 - "'For parents, teachers and students, the goal is to have a normal school experience, which means the overwhelming majority of students in school every day, five days a week,' Dennis Roche told Yahoo News."

Burbio in the News

Apr 14, 2021 - "Dennis Roche said the data he’s tracking shows school districts that received mandates with teeth from the state level were much quicker to get back to in-person learning. 'You really need very strong prescriptive guidance, not just incentives. You essentially need a mandate or an order to get it done,' he explained."

Burbio featured in The New York Times on the re-opening of schools

Mar 29, 2021 - "The change, Burbio officials said, appeared to be driven by the return in elementary and middle schools to in-person classes, and by the new rules from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention permitting schools to allow three feet of social distance instead of six feet in elementary schools."

Burbio's co-founder Dennis Roche is featured in this in-depth interview with The 74

Mar 17, 2021 - "Burbio soon became an indispensable resource for understanding the country-wide school reopening landscape. The Washington Post, Politico and the New York Times all regularly cite figures from the website, whose name is a play on the word “suburb,” in stories on schools."

Burbio featured in The Wall Street Journal Best of the Web

Feb 24, 2021 - "The analysis by Burbio, a community data service in New York that has been auditing 1,200 districts of various sizes across the country on their reopening status since last fall, shows California 49th among the 50 states in the proportion of students offered in-person instruction."

Burbio featured on NPR announcing new education secretary, Miguel Cardona's, confirmation

Feb 23, 2021 - "The school tracking website, Burbio, suggests schools have been gradually reopening. According to its tracker, 27.5% of students still attend virtual-only schools — down from 31% the week before. "

Burbio featured In The New York Times daily briefing

Feb 23, 2021 - "There are two obvious ways to reopen schools. One is to take precautions like mask wearing that minimize the risk of outbreaks inside school buildings. The other is to vaccinate the country’s teachers as quickly as possible. Both strategies now appear to be feasible — and yet neither is happening in many places. Instead, about half of K-12 students are still not spending any time in classrooms. The rates of school closures are highest in Maryland, New Mexico, California and Oregon, according to Burbio."

Burbio featured on CBS News reporting 91% of students live in CDC "red zones".

Feb 16, 2021 - "An analysis by Burbio shows that most students in the U.S. live in areas with very high rates of community transmission of COVID-19. The new color-coded Centers for Disease Control guidance for reopening schools places them in the red zone. CBS News White House reporter Bo Erickson joins CBSN's Anne-Marie Green and Vladimir Duthiers to discuss what this distinction means for schools and what parents need to know about the CDC guidance."

Burbio featured on CBS News while many schools have opened, it is hard to track how they're teaching

Feb 9, 2021 - "Sixty-four percent of elementary and middle school students are already seeing some in-person instruction, according to the most current data from Burbio's School Opening Tracker... It measures traditional in-person instruction and hybrid in-person and virtual learning, as well as schools using only virtual learning, which is the way 36% of students are being taught."

Burbio featured on Fox News about Biden's target for reopening schools

Feb 11, 2021 - According to data from Burbio, a digital platform that tracks school data from across the country, 66 percent of students in kindergarten through 12th grade are already attending traditional in-person classes five days a week, or are on a hybrid schedule — meaning they attend at least one day a week or more."

Burbio featured on PEW while pressure grows to reopen schools, fears persist

Feb 3, 2021 - Maryland is one of six states—alongside California, New Mexico, Oregon, Virginia and Washington—where most school districts have remained closed for in-person instruction since the pandemic began, said Dennis Roche, co-founder of New York-based school data group Burbio. “The question now is whether those governors can rally support for reopening schools and persuade teachers to return to classrooms after standing on the sidelines for so long,” he said.

Burbio featured on Time while Biden tries to get schools open in 100 days

Feb 1, 2021 - As of Jan. 31, 38.2% of K-12 students were attending schools offering virtual-only instruction, and 37.8% were attending schools offering daily in-person learning, according to a school reopening tracker Burbio..."

Burbio featured on NBC News as teachers request vaccines before returning to in person classes 

Jan 27, 2021 - “'Vaccinating teachers, it would seem, would make things easier,' Dennis Roche said. 'But this hasn’t moved the needle' in districts where education has mostly been virtual."

Burbio featured on NPR about schools struggling to bring kids back in person

Jan 27 2021 - "However, Burbio estimates that about a third of the country's students have not had a single day in school since last March. This includes much of the West Coast, the Mid-Atlantic and some big cities like Chicago, Philadelphia, Cleveland and Atlanta."

Burbio Featured on Bloomberg as Biden weighs in to reopen schools. 

Jan 22, 2021 - “The moves are a significant step in crafting a national framework for school reopening that until now has largely been left to states, cities and districts in the absence of guidelines from the former Trump administration."

Burbio featured on Education Week as the shift to remote learning accelerates

Jan 14 2021 - "...schools that offer only one mode of instruction: virtual learning. That figure was 37.2 percent on Nov. 2. It rose as high as 55 percent on Jan. 10, but that was driven mostly by a brief period in which some schools chose to be remote-only after the holidays, said Dennis Roche, who oversees the project, which follows 1,200 districts."

The Latest from Burbio

Jan 11, 2021 - “We expect the percentage of students attending virtual-only schools to drop over the course of the next six weeks as districts who did have students in the classroom in the Fall return after Covid-19 induced breaks,” said Burbio co-founder Julie Roche. “But the myriad of regulatory and labor obstacles to in-person learning in places that have never gotten started, the significant level of hybrid instruction across the US, and the unpredictable course of Covid-19 means the balance of the 2021 academic year will continue to be highly disrupted for the vast majority of K-12 public school students.”

Burbio featured in The Baltimore Sun about Maryland schools remaining in virtual learning.

Jan 4, 2021 - "...Maryland and the District of Columbia, as well as the Western states of California, Oregon and Washington have mostly remained closed, while Sunbelt states have reopened."

Burbio featured on Politico as School Districts Decide Future Plans

Dec 9, 2020 - As of Sunday, just over half of K-12 students in the nation attended schools that offer virtual-only plans, 32.5 percent attended “traditional” in-person schools and nearly 17 percent attended hybrid schools, according to Burbio,...

Burbio featured in USA Today Story on Covid Related School Closures

Nov 20, 2020 - ... Already, just over 40% of schoolchildren are attending only virtual classes, a figure that's risen from 36.9% Sunday, according to Burbio, a company that aggregates school calendars. 

Burbio featured in USA Today Overview of State of K-12 Education in response to COVID Disruptions

Nov 01, 2020 - Burbio is excited to be a part of this terrific overview on the state of K-12 education and learning across the US.

Burbio Data Underlies CBS Question to Dr. Fauci

Oct 14, 2020 - CBS News contacted Burbio for the latest data on number of students attending schools with in-person learning and posed a question to Dr. Fauci. Watch Video

Burbio in the Press

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