School Districts
ABC Unified
Anywhere County, CA
Whitethorn Elementary
Southern Humboldt Joint Unified District
Total Closure Days
0
Total Closure Days
1
Total Closure Days
7
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
0
Total Closure Days
0
Total Closure Days
1
Total Closure Days
1
Total Closure Days
0
Total Closure Days
0
Total Closure Days
6
Total Closure Days
4
Schools Impacted
0
Schools Impacted
1
Schools Impacted
1
Schools Impacted
0
Schools Impacted
0
Schools Impacted
0
Schools Impacted
0
Schools Impacted
0
Schools Impacted
0
Schools Impacted
0
Schools Impacted
0
Schools Impacted
1
Schools Impacted
1
Schools Impacted
0
Schools Impacted
0
Schools Impacted
1
Schools Impacted
1
Students Impacted
0
Students Impacted
56
Students Impacted
56
Students Impacted
0
Students Impacted
0
Students Impacted
0
Students Impacted
0
Students Impacted
0
Students Impacted
0
Students Impacted
0
Students Impacted
0
Students Impacted
60
Students Impacted
55
Students Impacted
0
Students Impacted
0
Students Impacted
67
Students Impacted
57
Overall Closures
| Reason | Category | Total Closure Days | Schools Impacted | Average Closure Days |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Inclement Weather | Natural Disasters & Weather | 9 | 1 | 9 |
| Canoe Fire 2003 | Wildfires | 6 | 1 | 6 |
| Power Outage | Infrastructure | 5 | 1 | 5 |
Wildfire Closures
Natural Disasters & Weather 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 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Inclement Weather | Natural Disasters & Weather | 2017-18 | 1 | 56 | Impassable roads - storm |
| Inclement Weather | Natural Disasters & Weather | 2016-17 | 7 | 56 | No power at the school site due to the storms in the area |
| Power Outage | Infrastructure | 2007-08 | 1 | 60 | Power outage |
| Power Outage | Infrastructure | 2002-03 | 4 | 57 | Power outage, lack of sanitary facilities, localized flooding. |
| Canoe Fire 2003 | Wildfires | 2003-04 | 6 | 67 | Wildfires creating unhealthy or hazardous levels of smoke throughout region |
| Inclement Weather | Natural Disasters & Weather | 2006-07 | 1 | 55 | district-wide power outages, heavy snow and rain, impassable roads |
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.