Survey Methodology: Online survey conducted with 2,277 US-based education decision-makers within the SmartBrief and Tech & Learning audiences.

The K-12 educational landscape is transforming, and the strategies schools use to acquire resources are evolving rapidly alongside it. Today’s education decision-makers face a unique intersection of challenges: shrinking budgets, persistent staff shortages, and the rapid rise of artificial intelligence.

The resulting data from our survey paints a clear picture of a market shifting toward year-round agility, localized decision-making, and a strong demand for authentic vendor partnerships.

The Timeline: A Constant Cycle

Historically, education product procurement was defined by a summer rush. Today, that seasonal model is largely obsolete. Modern school districts have transitioned away from traditional buying windows, adopting an agile, continuous approach to discovering, evaluating, and acquiring educational tools.

• Identifying Needs: 62% of school leaders identify purchasing needs on an ongoing basis.
• Evaluating Products: 67% continuously evaluate products throughout the year, integrating research into their regular workflows.
• The Final Decision: 54% make final buying decisions on a rolling, ongoing basis, though a notable 33% still prefer to finalize their choices during the traditional Spring/Summer window.

Who Holds the Power?

For vendors, successful outreach requires knowing exactly who sits at the decision-making table. While district-level buy-in remains important for large rollouts, localized building administrators and frontline instructional staff hold the most significant sway over what actually gets purchased for the classroom.

Key Purchasing Influencers:

• Building-Level Administrators: 61%
• Instructional Staff: 59%
• Instructional Directors: 54%
• Technology Directors: 52%
• Superintendents: 46%
• School Board Members: 24%
• Parents: 15%

Where the Dollars Are Going (12–24 Months)

Faced with ongoing funding hurdles, the explosion of AI, and persistent staff shortages, districts are highly strategic about their investments. Over the next two years, funding is being heavily targeted toward empowering teachers through professional development and robust instructional products.

Top General Spending Plans:

• Educator Professional Development: 68%
• Instructional Tools & Systems: 63%
• Hardware (Laptops/Tablets): 48%
• AI Tools: 37%

Top Teaching & Learning Products Considered:

• Assessment Tools: 41%
• Reading Curriculum: 38%
• AI Tools (Chatbots, lesson creation, etc.): 37%
• Math & STEM Curriculum: 36% (each)

Hurdles & Deal-Breakers

To combat tightening budgets and maximize return on investment, schools are meticulously scrutinizing overall costs, ease of implementation, safety, and interoperability.

Macro pressures heavily influence these choices: 80% of respondents cite funding and budgets as their biggest current challenge, followed by staff shortages (45%) and AI concerns (39%). Altogether, 76% say these overarching challenges moderately or significantly alter their purchasing behaviors.

When evaluating solutions, vendors must be aware of the top deal-breakers that will quickly derail a sale:

• Subscription Costs: 63%
• Lack of Alignment with State Standards: 47%
• High Complexity of Implementation: 41%
• Inability to Integrate with LMS/Current Systems: 37%

The Evolving Role of AI & Screen Time

Despite intense national media conversations regarding student screen time and the rapid rollout of AI, school policies remain steady. Rather than enforcing outright tech bans, administrators are taking a pragmatic, case-by-case evaluation approach.

• Screen-Time Concerns: Surprisingly, 44% of educators state that national screen-time trends have not affected their tech purchasing habits.
• AI Procurement Policies: 57% report no significant policy changes regarding AI, continuing to evaluate tools contextually.
• The AI Dichotomy: While AI is actively helping administrators streamline purchasing predictions and strategic planning, leaders remain understandably cautious regarding data privacy, security, and the rapid pace of tech evolution.

How to Reach Education Buyers

Traditional, aggressive sales pitches fall flat in the K-12 environment. Educators lean heavily on authentic peer networks and actionable, real-world case studies to cut through the marketing noise and find tools that actually work.

• Discovery Channels: Teachers and peers (72%) and education publications (69%) are the top trusted discovery channels, ranking ahead of standard vendor outreach (56%).
• Preferred Content Formats: Webinars (65%) and district case studies (52%) are ranked as the most helpful resources for evaluating a product.
• Inside the Webinar: 71% of buyers prefer hearing peer-led presentations from fellow educators, and 56% want concrete insight into product implementation directly from vendors.

KEY SURVEY TAKEAWAYS FOR EDUCATION MARKETERS

Strong vendor partnerships are built on a foundation of trust, clear communication, responsive support, and a deep understanding of unique school needs. Educators place extraordinary value on long-term collaboration, pricing flexibility, and ongoing support that extends well beyond the initial sale.

The Bottom Line: Schools are looking for transparent, long-term partners who understand their resource constraints, stand behind their product claims, and provide continuous post-sale support. Your buyers turn to trusted brands SmartBrief and Tech & Learning to find solutions that meet these needs.

Contact us here to learn how our extensive menu of products can promote your messaging as a trusted partner year round.

During the 2020-21 school year, kids quarantining with COVID or after an exposure to COVID, were frequently able to watch and participate in class from home through Zoom or other video conferencing software. But in the pre-Delta variant days of spring and early summer, many districts announced remote learning options would not be available going forward. 

The reasons for this decision made some sense at the time. Managing in-person and remote students, with sometimes underpowered equipment, was onerous for educators and didn’t always offer students the best learning opportunities. In addition, when planning for the upcoming school year was conducted, COVID cases were plummeting and many school leaders and others believed that quarantines would be less common. 

Today, the optimism of spring and early summer seems a distant memory and school leaders can no longer afford to believe that COVID disruptions will be minimal. Districts are now adopting a variety of strategies to keep students in class and keep them from falling behind if they have to quarantine. 

1. Quickly Identify COVID and Keep Symptomatic Students/Staff at Home  

It sounds obvious but having students and staff continue to stay home when they are symptomatic is potentially one key to keeping schools open to in-person learning. Having less symptomatic students in class also helps cut back on the spread of other common respiratory viruses. At the Green County Schools district in Snow Hill, N.C., last year, students who were symptomatic were supposed to stay home. When students showed up with symptoms anyhow they were quickly examined by a nurse. 

“We're fortunate in that we have a school nurse in every school,” says Patrick C. Miller, Ed.D., superintendent of Greene County Schools. “When we had these issues where kids came in with runny noses, or a cough or any other type of respiratory issue, our school did an assessment, and based on that assessment, would decide whether or not a COVID referral was needed. And believe it or not, if a child presented with respiratory issues that did not always end with a COVID referral. Some kids have allergy issues or asthma, and they were able to determine that it was a non-COVID issue based on professional opinion.” 

2. Help Limit Contacts With Vaccines & Masks  

Michael Lubelfeld, Ed.D, superintendent of North Shore School District 112 in Illinois, is optimistic that changes to quarantine rules will help keep more students in-person this year. 

“The Illinois Department of Public Health has revised its quarantine rules,” he says. “So vaccinated people, for example, which is about 97% of our adult staff, will not have to quarantine, if they're a close contact. We have seventh and eighth graders vaccinated, so they potentially would not have to quarantine.” 

As far as students too young to be vaccinated, masks are mandated for students and staff in Illinois schools, which can help reduce both the spread and the number of COVID contacts that need to be quarantined. “If you're masked, you may not have to quarantine either,” Lubelfeld says. “So the whole game has changed. All the rules have changed. And I think the bottom line here in Illinois is the goal for in-person schooling is really what the Department of Public Health is endorsing in its support of the CDC's latest guidelines.”

3. Test to Stay in Class  

Increased testing will also be a part of the strategy to keep students in-person at certain schools. Massachusetts recently announced its schools will use a “test and stay” protocol to allow students who have come in contact with someone with the coronavirus remain in school provided they take a daily test every day for at least five days. Massachusetts schools will use the Abbott BinaxNOW rapid test, which is easy to administer and takes about 15 minutes for results. 

Frequent testing is also being used to limit outbreaks. Lubelfeld’s district has partnered with the University of Illinois to administer its saliva-based spit COVID test twice per week to unvaccinated students and staff on school grounds. “This is twice as much as we did it last year,” Lubelfeld says. While the testing is currently optional, he hopes 70 to 80 percent of the schools unvaccinated population will participate twice a week. 

4. Support Students at Home  

Even the best mitigation strategies won’t be 100 percent successful. So when students are forced to quarantine with positive COVID cases or exposures, schools are employing a variety of strategies to support them. 

At Greene County Schools, classes will not be streamed over a video conferencing platform, as happened frequently last year. Instead, students will get emailed assignments as they did pre-pandemic if they were suspended or had to be out of class for an extended period of time due to an illness. But there will also likely be more COVID-era supports in place. “We are considering having after school programs with ESSER money,” Miller says. “That is one advantage that we'll have that we did not have in the past to help kids stay up to date if they do have to quarantine.” 

At Greenville County Schools in South Carolina, students who have a long-term absence of more than four weeks would be moved to the district’s virtual academy, says Jeff McCoy, associate superintendent for academics. Students who are absent in the short term will continue to contribute to class through the class LMS. 

Teachers will also have remote teaching options. “We can’t require it, but we do give our teachers the option also of live streaming their class,” McCoy says. “So if they know they've got two kids out on COVID quarantine, we do encourage them to live stream that class and kids can still participate in the class.” 

• K-12 Vaccine Mandates: What Educators Need to Know
• CDC Reverses Course: Masks Now Recommended for Vaccinated Educators and Students in Schools

New York City is the City that never sleeps and if you can make it here you'll make it anywhere. We have a reputation to live up to. Perhaps this is why the snow day thing is so difficult for our mayor and chancellor to call.

No matter what they decide, some people will be mad. We all know for the most part teachers and students celebrate snow days. But for others it's a headache!

Childcare and Meals

In NYC, as in other places, a layer of difficulty is that parents depend on schools for childcare and meals for their children. Taking off of work for some parents is not really an option because they might not get paid for that day, or worse. They could get fired.

So what is a chancellor, mayor, or in other districts a principal or superintendent to do?

Have a plan. It goes like this...

Have fewer schools open because there will be fewer staff and fewer students so you only need fewer schools and fewer meals.

It's not that hard

If you are thinking this would be too hard to figure out, just stop.This is the 21st century and we live in a city where we have Computer Science for All. An algorithm makes this elementary.

Everybody Wins

The result is this:
Students who need a place to go have one.

Teachers who are in danger commuting don't have to come in. Teachers who are not, come in. Those teachers who come in receive comp time in the form of a few extra prep periods. Good principals know how to do that at no expense to the school i.e. field trip, assembly, etc. etc. There are lots of other cost neutral options as well, but that is fodder for another post.

Lisa Nielsen writes for and speaks to audiences across the globe about learning innovatively and is frequently covered by local and national media for her views on “Passion (not data) Driven Learning,” "Thinking Outside the Ban" to harness the power of technology for learning, and using the power of social media to provide a voice to educators and students. Ms. Nielsen has worked for more than a decade in various capacities to support learning in real and innovative ways that will prepare students for success. In addition to her award-winning blog, The Innovative Educator, Ms. Nielsen’s writing is featured in places such as Huffington Post, Tech & Learning, ISTE Connects, ASCD Wholechild, MindShift, Leading & Learning, The Unplugged Mom, and is the author the book Teaching Generation Text.

Disclaimer: The information shared here is strictly that of the author and does not reflect the opinions or endorsement of her employer.