School Districts
ABC Unified
Anywhere County, CA
Knob Hill Elementary
San Marcos Unified District
Total Closure Days
0
Total Closure Days
1
Total Closure Days
0
Total Closure Days
0
Total Closure Days
0
Total Closure Days
2
Total Closure Days
0
Total Closure Days
1
Total Closure Days
0
Total Closure Days
0
Total Closure Days
0
Total Closure Days
6
Total Closure Days
0
Total Closure Days
0
Total Closure Days
0
Total Closure Days
5
Total Closure Days
0
Schools Impacted
0
Schools Impacted
1
Schools Impacted
0
Schools Impacted
0
Schools Impacted
0
Schools Impacted
1
Schools Impacted
0
Schools Impacted
1
Schools Impacted
0
Schools Impacted
0
Schools Impacted
0
Schools Impacted
1
Schools Impacted
0
Schools Impacted
0
Schools Impacted
0
Schools Impacted
1
Schools Impacted
0
Students Impacted
0
Students Impacted
833
Students Impacted
0
Students Impacted
0
Students Impacted
0
Students Impacted
876
Students Impacted
0
Students Impacted
839
Students Impacted
0
Students Impacted
0
Students Impacted
0
Students Impacted
858
Students Impacted
0
Students Impacted
0
Students Impacted
0
Students Impacted
787
Students Impacted
0
Overall Closures
| Reason | Category | Total Closure Days | Schools Impacted | Average Closure Days |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2007 Southern California Fires | Wildfires | 6 | 1 | 6 |
| 2003 Southern California Fires | Wildfires | 5 | 1 | 5 |
| 2014 San Diego Fires | Wildfires | 2 | 1 | 2 |
| 2017 Southern California Fires | Wildfires | 1 | 1 | 1 |
| Power Outage | Infrastructure | 1 | 1 | 1 |
Wildfire Closures
Infrastructure Closures
Reported Incidents
Nature of Emergency descriptions are included as they were detailed in records from the California Department of Education and may contain grammatical errors and inconsistencies.
| Reason | Category | School Year | Total Closure Days | Enrollment | Description |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2007 Southern California Fires | Wildfires | 2007-08 | 6 | 858 | 2007 southern California fires |
| 2003 Southern California Fires | Wildfires | 2003-04 | 5 | 787 | San Diego County Fires |
| 2017 Southern California Fires | Wildfires | 2017-18 | 1 | 833 | San Diego Fires-State of Emergency |
| 2014 San Diego Fires | Wildfires | 2013-14 | 2 | 876 | San Marcos Fire |
| Power Outage | Infrastructure | 2011-12 | 1 | 839 | Southern California power outage |
Methodology and Data
In California, school districts that close schools for emergencies can request that the California Department of Education protect their attendance-based funding. Such requests, known as Form J-13A waivers, must list the closed schools, dates, number of lost days and reasons for the emergency. Using the California Public Records Act, CalMatters compiled the 17 years of these requests on file with the department to build a school-site level database of reported school closures.
Closure days were defined as one lost day of instruction at a single public school site. School that did not report any closures or where enrollment could not be verified were omitted.
School districts self-report their closure information to state education authorities, who hand-enter it into a database for internal use. For this reason, it may contain errors and inconsistencies. Because the state does not specify a deadline for requesting J-13A waivers, some districts submitted multiple school closure incidents on a single request, or submitted multiple requests for a single incident. In these cases, CalMatters manually cleaned and sorted the data.
If you have any questions about the database, discover any errors or have interest in downloading the data, please email ricardo@calmatters.org. Read more about our data in our full methodology.