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 or 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.
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- Looking for information about the 2020-21 school year? Education Week tracked where schools were open or closed due to COVID-19 here: Map: Where Has COVID-19 Closed Schools? Where Are They Open?
- You can also see how over 900 school districts provided instruction on their first day of the 2020-21 school year here: School Districts’ Reopening Plans: A Snapshot
- For more information, see our detailed coverage of the pandemic and its impact on schools.
Update Note: A previous version of this page included an interactive map and a table that showed which states didn’t order or recommend school buildings to be closed for the academic year. Both the map and the table have since been removed. The states that didn’t close for the academic year were Montana and Wyoming.
State Data
Explore the table below for detailed information about closures at the state level.
Sources: Staff reporting; National Center for Education Statistics; government websites and communications
Note: Historical data includes school- and district-level data collected from 3/9/2020 to 3/25/2020 and state-level data as of 5/15/2020.
Education Week would like to know how you are using our data on school building closures and reopening timelines. Please share how this information is helping you by emailing library@educationweek.org.
Contact Information
For media or research inquiries about this data, contact library@educationweek.org.
How to Cite This Page
Map: Coronavirus and School Closures (2020, March 6). Education Week. Retrieved Month Day, Year from https://www-edweek-org.proxy2.library.illinois.edu/leadership/map-coronavirus-and-school-closures-in-2019-2020/2020/03
Data Note
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’s available. School and enrollment numbers for the Department of Defense Education Activity were provided by the agency and are from 2020.
