By Election Day, more than 60% of U.S. K-12 public school students will be attending schools that offer in-person learning at least a few days a week, an updated tracker finds.
More and more districts are opening up school buildings this fall, even as coronavirus infection rates remain high in most states. That's according to the latest release from Burbio, a company that aggregates school and community calendars from the Web.
As of Election Day, the report says:
From Labor Day to Election Day, Burbio calculates the percentage of students with access to at least some in-person school will have grown by 22 percentage points, from 38% to 60%. There are large regional variations, with states like Texas and Florida offering full-time, in-person learning to more than 75% of students, while California, Washington, Maryland, Oregon and Hawaii have more than 90% of their students learning only online.
These numbers don't necessarily speak to the full picture of how children are learning. That's because a percentage of students choose virtual learning even where in-person school is offered. For example, New York City, where schools are hybrid, recently announced that only 280,000 students are attending in person, out of 1.1 million enrolled.
Burbio says it gathers its information directly from school websites across a national sample of 1,200 districts in all 50 states, including the 200 largest districts in the country.
Copyright 2021 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.
