The coronavirus pandemic forced a near-total shutdown of school buildings in the spring of 2020—an historic upheaval of K-12 schooling in the United States.
Education Week tracked and documented the closures—first at the school district level and ultimately, state-by-state, from March 6 to May 15, 2020.
At their peak, the closures affected at least 55.1 million students in 124,000 U.S. public and private schools. Nearly every state either ordered or recommended that schools remain closed through the end of the 2019-20 school year.
On this page you will find all the versions of the downloadable data Education Week published from 3/9/2020 to 3/25/2020 on school closures as well as our final update on 5/15/2020.
As the trend of school closings moved from the school to the district and then the state level, our tracking also evolved:
- School level data: 3/9/2020-3/14/2020
- District level data: 3/9/2020-3/23/2020
- State level data: 3/13/2020-3/25/2020 and 5/15/2020
On March 15, 2020 we began removing districts from the data when their state closed. On March 24, 2020 we removed districts from the data entirely.
We stopped updating this data after May 15, 2020, when the vast majority of school buildings had been closed for the rest of the school year. To see how states were determining how school buildings were open or closed for the 2020-2021 academic year, view our 2020-21 map. You can also see a snapshot of how many individual districts reopened on their first day in school year 2020-2021.
Sources
Local news reporting; National Center for Education Statistics; school/district websites; government websites
All numbers for student enrollment and schools are from the National Center for Education Statistics. Total U.S. public and private school enrollments reflect NCES’ 2019 projections. Student enrollments in the state-level table and map are NCES’ Fall 2016 data for public schools and Fall 2017 data for private schools. Numbers of schools in the state-level table and map are NCES’ data for 2016-17 for public schools and Fall 2017 for private schools. In each case, we used the latest NCES data that were available.
Permissions
For commercial reuse of this data please contact library@educationweek.org.
Suggested Citation
Education Week. (2020). Map: Coronavirus and School Closures. [Data file]. Retrieved from https://www.edweek.org/leadership/map-coronavirus-and-school-closures-in-2019-2020/2020/03
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