School Districts
ABC Unified
Anywhere County, CA
Sierra House Elementary
Lake Tahoe Unified District
Total Closure Days
0
Total Closure Days
0
Total Closure Days
5
Total Closure Days
0
Total Closure Days
1
Total Closure Days
0
Total Closure Days
0
Total Closure Days
0
Total Closure Days
0
Total Closure Days
0
Total Closure Days
0
Total Closure Days
1
Total Closure Days
0
Total Closure Days
0
Total Closure Days
1
Total Closure Days
0
Total Closure Days
2
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
0
Schools Impacted
0
Schools Impacted
0
Schools Impacted
1
Schools Impacted
0
Schools Impacted
0
Schools Impacted
1
Schools Impacted
0
Schools Impacted
1
Students Impacted
0
Students Impacted
0
Students Impacted
500
Students Impacted
0
Students Impacted
502
Students Impacted
0
Students Impacted
0
Students Impacted
0
Students Impacted
0
Students Impacted
0
Students Impacted
0
Students Impacted
458
Students Impacted
0
Students Impacted
0
Students Impacted
641
Students Impacted
0
Students Impacted
402
Overall Closures
| Reason | Category | Total Closure Days | Schools Impacted | Average Closure Days |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Inclement Weather | Natural Disasters & Weather | 9 | 1 | 9 |
| Pineapple Express | Natural Disasters & Weather | 1 | 1 | 1 |
Natural Disasters & Weather 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 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Pineapple Express | Natural Disasters & Weather | 2014-15 | 1 | 502 | "Pineapple Express" - Severe winter storm caused widespread power outages. |
| Inclement Weather | Natural Disasters & Weather | 2002-03 | 2 | 402 | Powerful winter storms caused power outages and blocked roadways. |
| Inclement Weather | Natural Disasters & Weather | 2016-17 | 5 | 500 | School Closure due to state of emergency; winter storm, heavy snow, rain. Requested seven days; January 9-13, and January 23-24, 2017. Approving five days and asking them to use 2 built in snow days. |
| Inclement Weather | Natural Disasters & Weather | 2004-05 | 1 | 641 | Series of winter storms forced the school to close and use all of their snow days built into their school calendar |
| Inclement Weather | Natural Disasters & Weather | 2007-08 | 1 | 458 | heavy snow storm |
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.