Causes, characteristics, and patterns of prolonged unplanned school closures prior to the COVID-19 pandemic—United States, 2011–2019
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Abstract
Outside of pandemics, there is little information about occurrence of prolonged unplanned K-12 school closures (PUSC). We describe here the reasons, characteristics, and patterns of PUSC in the United States during 8 consecutive inter-pandemic academic years, 2011–2019.
Methods
From August 1, 2011 through June 30, 2019, daily systematic online searches were conducted to collect data on publicly announced unplanned school closures lasting ≥1 school days in the United States. Closures were categorized as prolonged when schools were closed for ≥5 unplanned days (approximating one full workweek), excluding weekends and scheduled days off per school calendars.
Results
During the eight academic years, a total of 22,112 PUSCs were identified, affecting over 800,000 teachers and 13 million students that resulted in 91.5 million student-days lost. A median of 62.9% of students in PUSC-affected schools were eligible for subsidized school meals. Most affected schools were in cities (35%) and suburban areas (33%). Natural disasters (47%), adverse weather conditions (35%), and budget/teacher strikes (15%) were the most frequently cited reasons for PUSC; illness accounted for 1%, and building/facility issues, environmental issues and violence together accounted for the remaining 2%. The highest number of PUSCs occurred in Health and Human Services Regions 2, 3, 4, and 6 encompassing areas that are frequently in the path of hurricanes and tropical storms. The majority of PUSCs in these regions were attributed to a handful of hurricanes during the fall season, including hurricanes Sandy, Irma, Harvey, Florence, and Matthew.
Conclusions
PUSCs occur annually in the United States due to a variety of causes and are associated with a substantive loss of student-days for in-school learning. Both these prior experiences with PUSCs and those during the current COVID-19 pandemic illustrate a need for creating sustainable solutions for high-quality distance learning and innovative supplemental feeding programs nationwide, especially in disaster-prone areas.
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SciScore for 10.1101/2021.11.02.21265805: (What is this?)
Please note, not all rigor criteria are appropriate for all manuscripts.
Table 1: Rigor
Ethics not detected. Sex as a biological variable not detected. Randomization not detected. Blinding not detected. Power Analysis not detected. Table 2: Resources
No key resources detected.
Results from OddPub: We did not detect open data. We also did not detect open code. Researchers are encouraged to share open data when possible (see Nature blog).
Results from LimitationRecognizer: We detected the following sentences addressing limitations in the study:Our results should be considered in context of at least five limitations. First, the data are limited to closures that were found in publicly available online sources and therefore may not be complete or entirely accurate. Second, while HHS Regions 2 and 9 …
SciScore for 10.1101/2021.11.02.21265805: (What is this?)
Please note, not all rigor criteria are appropriate for all manuscripts.
Table 1: Rigor
Ethics not detected. Sex as a biological variable not detected. Randomization not detected. Blinding not detected. Power Analysis not detected. Table 2: Resources
No key resources detected.
Results from OddPub: We did not detect open data. We also did not detect open code. Researchers are encouraged to share open data when possible (see Nature blog).
Results from LimitationRecognizer: We detected the following sentences addressing limitations in the study:Our results should be considered in context of at least five limitations. First, the data are limited to closures that were found in publicly available online sources and therefore may not be complete or entirely accurate. Second, while HHS Regions 2 and 9 include US territories, the data are limited to the 50 US states and DC and therefore US territories are not represented in these data. Third, the data are limited to information found in English language sources. Fourth, the data on PUSCs are limited to closures for which reopening dates could be found. Information regarding school reopening may have been sent directly to the school community via texts, emails, or phone calls, thereby bypassing the news media. Fifth, particularly in the case of disrupted infrastructures and facilities, schools and districts may not have been able to report updates on school status to the public media. These limitations could have led to an underestimation of prolonged closures, particularly for private, small, or remotely situated schools for which public news sources may be fewer. However, one notable advantage of this data collection method is that it enabled long-term evaluation of school closure trends without imposing any reporting burden on schools and school districts. We previously reported on the methods and rationale for this data collection, along with the initial two years of data on closures of any length [3]. While the previous study considered closures of ≥4 days prolonged-d...
Results from TrialIdentifier: No clinical trial numbers were referenced.
Results from Barzooka: We did not find any issues relating to the usage of bar graphs.
Results from JetFighter: We did not find any issues relating to colormaps.
Results from rtransparent:- Thank you for including a conflict of interest statement. Authors are encouraged to include this statement when submitting to a journal.
- Thank you for including a funding statement. Authors are encouraged to include this statement when submitting to a journal.
- No protocol registration statement was detected.
Results from scite Reference Check: We found no unreliable references.
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