How Can Education Companies Capitalize on Voter-Approved Projects?

Last year was a huge one for the passage of school bonds, as voters approved the most money for school districts via referendums in at least the last decade, according to a group that tracks ballot items that deliver money for education.

Voters across the country decided about 2,300 bonds last year — and ultimately approved more than $116 billion to help schools fund a wide array of projects, per the Amos Group, which tracks the measures through the online databases SchoolBondFinder and SchoolNetwork.

That dollar figure represents a 39% increase year-over-year compared to 2023, when voters approved about $82.5 billion.

“I don’t know that we will see such a high jump as we did in 2024 again,” said Petra Sucher, marketing engagement and analytics manager for the Amos Group.

That increase in voter-approved bond funding for K-12 could mean more opportunities — and competition — for companies that do business with school systems.

And with federal stimulus dollars having expired, and the prevailing threat of federal K-12 funding cuts by the Trump administration, school systems are facing tight budgets. The funding districts receive through ballot measures is likely to prove crucial to their spending prioritiesin the near future.

So far in 2025, voters have approved about $33 billion in school bonds, with 711 initiatives passing and 218 failing.

The Amos group is tracking around 900 more potential school bond referendums that could be voted on this year (in August and November). Some — 39 total — have already been approved by school boards, but the vast majority — 854 — have yet to get that far.

Current estimates for 2025 put approved bond dollars at around $67 billion, according to the Amos Group, but that figure is expected to grow by year’s end, as some of the roughly 900 potential bond initiatives do not have dollar values attached to them yet.

EdWeek Market Brief spoke with Sucher, and Chuck Atmos, CEO of the Amos Group, about the money currently flowing into school districts from bond measures, how K-12 leaders will spend that money, and the opportunities that funding creates for education companies.

What has driven the surge of school bond passages over the past year?

Sucher: It is not unusual during election years that there is higher voter turnout, so it’s not uncommon that you would see more bonds pass. With it being a presidential election year, that even increases the chances of a higher voter turnout. Because more people are coming out for the presidential election, local officials will add certain bonds and referendums to the ballot to get support.

I do want to mention that the increase in [school bond] funds for 2024 not only had to do with the presidential elections, it also had to do with the ESSER funds. States and districts that had to use up some of the ESSER funds could use [that money] for some capital building [improvements].

Could you elaborate on their usage of ESSER funds?

Amos: Say a district had a huge project for building new schools, bringing in technology and redoing their HVAC. The HVAC that might have been originally thought of as part of the initial bond dollars were able to be used in other places because the ESSER dollars could be used for HVAC upgrades.

And so when that happened, we would capture that information. There were elements of augmentation that do kind of make their way into our numbers because the districts would say, ‘We are augmenting this initiative and stretching the dollars elsewhere and using the Covid relief dollars categorically as we’re allowed to.’

So schooldistricts were supplementing capital projects that they had planned to pay for using ESSER funds with additional bond money?

Amos: Districts needed to do that because their needs far outstripped the ESSER funding. While the ESSER dollars were incredibly helpful, they didn’t come anywhere near to meeting all the needs that districts had, and they had to find other ways to improve their facilities. It ended up being complimentary. They needed the bond dollars because the ESSER dollars frankly just didn’t meet all their needs.

What impact do you think ESSER dollars expiring will have on demand for future school bonds initiatives?

Amos: Districts don’t have anywhere near as much flexibility in their current budgets, and there are very stark and deep needs across the board.

My observation is anecdotal, but it might very well be that districts will be looking to help shore up the critical needs that are no longer covered by other budgets. And with uncertainty at the federal level, at this point there’s a lot of reason for them to want to take their destiny into their own hands at the local level.

Plus, when you factor in the potential for increased prices for critical physical goods, it wouldn’t surprise me at all if we see amounts actually going up to augment the uncertainty around tariffs and potential price increases.

What are school districts’ biggest priorities in spending the money from this wave of bond measures?

Amos: There are areas that are increasing on a regular basis over the last many years and others that are flat or decreasing.

One example, and this makes sense based on a lot of macro issues, is CTE [career and technical education]. It’s just continually going up at a nice pace and has been over the last many years. Obviously, there’s been a big, unfortunate spike in school safety and security that has started to level out a little bit, but it is still growing.

The category referred to as ‘Specialty Areas’ is generally the category that has the most bonds passed every year. What does that term encompass?

Amos: It’s almost a catchall. For instance, in our filters, we don’t have things like VR [virtual reality] labs. Well, they’re becoming incredibly popular in schools. There’s companies that are doing things like early career exploration through VR.

Districts are investing in that kind of stuff to be able to expose kids to where the workforce is heading. I know of one company that has all kinds of stuff like [VR] lobster fishing experiences and what it’s like to be a wind turbine repair technician. You’re not going to be taking kids up to the top of a wind turbine and you’re sure not going to be taking them out off the coast of Maine lobster fishing.

Can you explain the difference in the two types of ballot measures districts use: Bonds and levies?

Amos: Bonds are for building, and levies are for learning.

When a district does a bond, they get the approval from the public and once it’s approved, they go to the capital markets. That bond gets sold, and they get those dollars and then spend them on the projects that the public approved. It’s almost always for big capital projects.

Levies, on the other hand, are provided over a set period that the public approves, so it can be five years, 10 years, 20 years for X amount of dollars per year. [It] is collected typically right through property taxes and then remitted back to the district that they use for the categoricals that the public approved.

Do districts have greater leeway in how they can spend money from a levy versus money from a bond?

Amos: Generally speaking, because levies are not interest-bearing, you don’t have the same limitations. And levees tend to be used more often for things like ongoing technology updates or teacher salary increases or administrative solutions. There’s just more flexibility.

You can do technology in a bond, but you also oftentimes see a technology levy that is designed to bring in technology and then have the money to be able to refresh and do the training around it and all the other administrative solutions that they need and sometimes even curriculum.

Are those parameters concrete 100% of the time?

Amos: They can overlap, and it does get a little fuzzy because in some cases I know of districts that have used bond dollars to purchase instructional materials because it was within what they had approved from the public. While there are general kinds of parameters they are not perfect. There is not a perfect differentiation between: this only happens in a bond and this only happens in a levy.

Seventy-five percent of school referendums were approved nationally last year. But there’s some big differences in the pass/fail rate at the state level. Why?

Amos: Every state is very different. You have some states that typically are as low as a 40% pass rate. You’ve got more wealthy states that have much more robust budgets and you’ve got much poorer states. There does generally seem to be a correlation between that.

If it’s a poor community and they know that they can’t afford another $100 a year on their property taxes and it takes them 10 minutes to go out and vote and say no, they’re going to say no. In other situations, like Oregon, which has one of the lower pass rates, they require a super majority (of votes) to pass an initiative, so it’s a very high bar.