K-12 Services

State, local, and school administrators can leverage our dynamic dashboards to simulate the spread of COVID-19 in real time. The agent-based models Mathematica uses help educators make informed decisions about how to offer needed in-person educational opportunities, while mitigating the risk of infection spread. In a recent study, Mathematica used these agent-based models to run more than 400,000 scenarios of infection spread across more than 100 different school situations, simulating the interactions of groups to assess their effects on the system as a whole. The tool enables users to adjust by school level, school size, operating strategy, approach to quarantines and closures, and the local community’s COVID-19 infection rate. The results offer educators and civic leaders a set of schools comparable to their own and provide insights based on evidence about the best approaches for individual communities and schools.

In addition, our models supply school districts with resources to address staffing changes, quarantining staff, and teacher shortages.

Learn more about our COVID Simulator.

We can help your school or community create a community-monitoring and detection safety net. Using our proven process for testing wastewater, you can detect the presence of COVID-19 in your school or county even before symptoms appear.

Applying the same methods we use for community-level testing of opioids at wastewater treatment plants, we can conduct targeted COVID-19 testing at the individual building level. Mathematica offers expertise to synthesize, contextualize, and interpret wastewater data alongside other public health data. In partnership with local labs, our wastewater data analysis enables communities to build testing strategies that support informed decisions for mitigating the virus’s spread. Wastewater testing is inexpensive, yields quick results, and requires minimal lift from operations staff.