DMARC in US public school districts, by state: October 2026
DemiSignal, https://demisignal.com/research/k12-district-dmarc-2026-10

Data file: k12-district-dmarc-2026-10.csv (aggregate counts and percentages per state, plus one row for all covered districts).

Input: the NCES Common Core of Data local education agency directory for school year 2024-25 (file ccd_lea_029_2425_w_0a_051425). The file lists 13,412 open regular public school districts, including districts that are part of a supervisory union. We kept those that list a website. open_regular_districts_in_file gives each state's count in the file.

Coverage: Idaho, Louisiana and Nebraska list no district websites in that file, so their districts are not covered. Seven jurisdictions with one or two districts each are left out of every row, the all-covered-districts row included, so no row describes or reveals a single district.

Domains: each district's website address was reduced to its registrable domain using the Public Suffix List bundled with DemiSignal's checker. Where three or more districts share that domain, as in a state network, the district's own host name (without www) is scanned instead. Districts on shared site builders or hosting platforms are left out.

Scan: every domain was scanned on 14 October 2026 with DemiSignal's DNS checker, the same DMARC, SPF and MX checks the free check at https://demisignal.com/check runs. The scan read public DNS only. It sent no email and read no DMARC reports.

Unit: the district. Districts that share a domain each count once, with that domain's result.

DNS errors: a district whose domain still returned a DNS error for its MX or DMARC lookup after at least one retry is excluded and counted in dns_errors_excluded.

Mail districts: a district counts when its domain publishes at least one MX record other than a null MX. Districts whose domain publishes no MX record or only a null MX are counted in no_mx_or_null_mx and left out of every percentage. A district website domain is not always its mail domain, so this undercounts districts that receive mail elsewhere.

Percentages: every *_pct column for DMARC states is a share of mx_districts. reports_cannot_arrive_pct is a share of districts_with_policy.

DMARC states, from the record at _dmarc.example.com for each scanned domain example.com (a domain with no record of its own takes its parent organization's record):
no_dmarc_record: no TXT record starting with v=DMARC1.
invalid_dmarc: two or more DMARC records, or a record with no valid p= tag and no report address, so no policy applies.
p_none, p_quarantine, p_reject: the policy receivers apply. A record with an invalid p= tag but a valid report address counts as p_none.
no_policy_in_effect: no_dmarc_record plus invalid_dmarc.
enforced: p_quarantine plus p_reject.
enforced_with_sp_none: enforced districts whose record also sets sp=none, which leaves subdomains at none; they stay in enforced.
enforced_with_pct_0: enforced districts whose record also sets pct=0; they stay in enforced.
not_enforcing: no_policy_in_effect plus p_none.
districts_with_policy: p_none plus p_quarantine plus p_reject.
reports_cannot_arrive: districts with a policy whose record has no rua tag, has no valid mailto: address in it, or sends reports only to another organization's domain that has not published an authorization record for it.

No district is named in this data or on the page.