In Continued Rise More Than 60% of U.S. K-12 Public School Students Starting School "Virtually" This Fall

PELHAM, N.Y., Sept. 2, 2020 /PRNewswire-PRWeb/ -- More than 60% of US K-12 public school students will be attending school remotely to start the school year, up from an estimated of 52% in early August according to a comprehensive and ongoing survey conducted by Burbio.com, a data service that aggregates school and community calendars nationwide. Specifically, 62% of students are projected to be learning online to start the year, 37% will be attending in-person either every day or certain days of the week, and just under 1% of students are in school districts that still haven't finalized plans. A national overview of the data can be found at Burbio's School Opening Tracker.

"We continue to see a shift to online learning from previously announced or mandated in-person plans," noted Burbio co-founder Julie Roche, noting that districts such as Hawaii, Dallas, Boston as well as mid-size communities throughout the NY region walked back existing in person plans. "As start dates got closer districts decided they weren't ready to bring students in the classroom."

On Tuesday New York City, the nation's largest district, pushed its start date back to September 21st while maintaining plans for hybrid learning. Schools have now started in most of the country. Future changes in the data will be driven by districts that have already opened making changes in one direction or the other.

Of the 37% of districts having in-person learning, 19% are attending school every day and 18% will be attending a hybrid format where students only attend on certain days.

Even as the majority of changes in the Burbio study involve a shift to virtual learning from in-person, several districts are making transitions in the other direction. Orange County, FL, and Killeen TX, schools have already transitioned to in-person learning after a remote start.    Burbio estimates over 11 million students across the US are currently attending school in-person either every day or certain days of the week.

"Schools in the Sun Belt shifting to in-person from virtual are an interesting trend," added Roche. "If they can make a successful transition, we expect to see more changes like that in the month of September. Many of the districts who postponed in-person plans in late August set goals to start in-person learning early in the Fall. It's going to be a very fluid across the US as districts learn what they are comfortable with."

Burbio's data set consists of more than 80,000 K-12 school calendars across all 50 states and is dynamically updated as events are added or changed. For this initiative, Burbio actively monitors districts representing over 35,000 schools, including the 200 largest school districts in the U.S. District plans are reviewed every 72 hours to identify changes. School districts in the data set are a mix of sizes and distributed nationally in such a way to represent local decision-making across the country

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About the Methodology
Margin for error is 2.73% at 95% confidence level. For detailed methodology visit https://about.burbio.com/methodology/ or email [email protected]

About Burbio:
Burbio.com is the industry leader in aggregating school, government, library and community event information for digital consumer engagement and business decision making. Burbio's technology organizes and streams millions of hyper-local events across the US and keeps them automatically updated. Burbio's relevant and critical content is engaging for consumers and important for business decision making. In addition to the Burbio.com consumer service, Burbio works with digital media companies, local broadcasters, real estate firms, government and library partners, national non-profits, corporate clients and investment professionals who use this community event information to engage consumers and better manage and predict their business.

SOURCE Burbio, Inc