A massive rise in material and labor costs could stymie the start of any new construction tied to Ann Arbor Public Schools’ capital bond this year.
District leaders reported a 44.4% rise in inflation related to projects in the second phase of AAPS’ campaign just over six years after voters approved a $1 billion capital bond.
Initially budgeting for a 2.1% rise, the 32% higher-than-expected difference will reportedly send officials back to the drawing board as they wait for the outcome of a sinking fund renewal request expected to go before voters in the months ahead.
Crews broke ground in 2025 on new buildings to replace Dicken, Logan, Mitchell and Thurston elementary schools, as well as the modernization of Slauson Middle School.
However, a host of other projects were penciled in for the second phase through 2030.
Here are a few takeaways about what the change means for local taxpayers and the AAPS community.
 

The price tag for a proposed rebuild of Madison Park High School in Boston may seem shocking with an estimate reaching $700 million — here’s a look at some of Massachusetts most expensive school builds and how costs have skyrocketed in recent years.

The ten largest school building projects have all received approval from the Massachusetts School Building Authority (MSBA) and local communities since 2018, ranging from $285 million to over $659 million for a Lexington High School project moving forward last year.

New pre-K through eighth grade schools, early childhood programs in high schools and campus closures are some of the many options the Clark County School District could consider to address a school facility funding shortfall, according to a new report.
Clark County School Board trustees will hear district officials Wednesday present a report on preliminary draft options to best optimize how the district’s 374 school buildings are used.
While the report floats hundreds of ideas, additional materials in the meeting’s agenda show some of the most referenced options are:
— Continuing school renovations and replacements that are already planned.
— Converting select elementary and middle schools into pre-K through eighth grade schools.
— Opening new pre-K through eighth grade schools.
— Constructing additions to existing schools to relieve overcrowding.
— Establishing new pre-K programs at high schools.
— Creating new “choice” programs at existing elementary and middle schools.
— Closing and rezoning select elementary and middle schools.
 

The School District of Philadelphia has revised its proposed $2.8 billion Facilities Master Plan, reducing the number of recommended school closures from 20 to 18 and removing Russell Conwell Middle School and Motivation High School from the list.

The updated proposal was presented during a public Board of Education meeting that drew more than a thousand attendees, with overflow space used to accommodate the crowd. Community members gathered outside district headquarters before the meeting, chanting “save our schools,” as board members reviewed the revisions.

Under the revised plan, Russell Conwell Middle School will remain open. Instead of closing the Kensington school, the district now plans for students from Lewis Elkin Elementary School to feed into Conwell to increase enrollment.

Roanoke City Public Schools plans to install solar-powered microgrids to store and distribute power for both of its high school buildings. The upgrades will be fully financed by a mixture of state funding and a private grant, and, combined with solar panel installations, are estimated to save millions of dollars in energy costs over the next few decades at a time when city budget cuts have created a $16.5 million annual budget deficit for Roanoke’s schools.

The project is part of a broader multi-year shift to solar energy by the school division, its director of communications Claire Mitzel told the Virginia Independent in a phone interview. 

The School District of La Crosse hosted a groundbreaking ceremony at the site of the former Hogan Administrative Center.
The ceremony marks the official start of construction on a brand-new elementary school that will bring together students and staff from Emerson and Spence Elementary Schools.
A $53 million referendum was approved in 2024 to consolidate the elementary schools.
Superintendent Aaron Engel says the district has sought this for years, and officials are excited to see the project finally come to fruition.
“We knew that we had declining enrollment. We knew that we had to do something about our aging facilities. We’ve spent a lot of time in the office drafting plans. It’s really neat to finally be able to break ground and get started on the actual construction,” says Engel.
Director of elementary education Shelly Shirel says it took everyone from school officials, to partners and community members to get this project to where it is now.
“The three story elementary school that will emerge from this spot will be more than a building. It will reflect collaboration, thoughtful planning, and our shared commitment to students and community. It will be a place where students, staff, and our community can grow, explore, and thrive together,” says Shirel.
Along with officials from the school and city, students from Emerson and Spence Elementary also joined the ceremony for their future school building.
 

An elementary school playground in Clinton Township is showing signs of serious wear, and parents say children are still using the equipment despite visible rust and cracked plastic.

Brittney Beardsley said she told her 4-year-old daughter, Teagan, to stay away from the playground because of the damage.

Beardsley said she reported the damage to the school but saw no repairs, which led her to contact us for help.

“I want them to fix it. I want them to take care of our kids. I’ve been home since COVID hit, since they went virtual, and I’m home with my kids every day because I don’t trust other people to watch my kids. I’m supposed to be able to trust the school, and I can’t even do that,” said Beardsley.

Local 4 reached out to Clinton Valley Elementary School and sent photos of the damage.

The Newark Board of Education is steering $6.3 million in state funds to repairs at two city high schools as part of efforts to maintain the district’s decades-old buildings.

The board on Thursday approved the bulk of the money — $6 million — for repairs at Technology High School, while just under $350,000 will go to Weequahic High School. The funds come from a Schools Development Authority grant that allocated $6,349,715 to Newark this fiscal year for urgent building needs and to prevent further deterioration. The SDA is the state agency responsible for fully funding school construction projects in Newark and 30 other high-poverty districts.

The district proposes urgent repairs and maintenance projects to the state, and once the SDA approves them, it directs funding to schools that need it. Unlike state funds for urgent repairs, the SDA decides which schools to build or renovate and manages new construction from start to finish.

On Feb. 26, Houston ISD’s board of managers unanimously voted to close 12 schools in June—a choice district leaders said will save HISD $14.6 million to $20 million.

What’s happening

Seven of the schools will be closed permanently, while the remaining schools will be co-located at a separate campus, as previously reported by Community Impact.

During the Feb. 26 special meeting, Superintendent Mike Miles said maintenance costs and declining enrollment fueled the decision to close schools. From the 2022-23 to the 2023-24 school year, the district lost roughly 13,200 students, or about 7% of its total population.

“It's a tough decision,” Miles said. “We recognize that, but we got to the point where the school facilities—to repair them is so much more expensive than replacing them at the end of the day. ... Besides the enrollment problem.”

 Lynchburg City Schools is asking the city for just over $42 million — about $2.7 million more than last year — to support its capital improvement plan and day-to-day operations.

“Funding towards schools, I’m always going to be a thumbs up because they’re the environments where our kids spend the majority of their waking hours. Environment effects mental health, it can even affect, the outlook on self in so many ways.”

The school district has submitted a list of needs to the city manager that outlines building repairs, maintenance priorities, and operational costs tied to the capital plan.

“Probably one of the biggest or most costly things that comes with schools are the teachers and the people. The teachers are very important. They’re an interictal part of educating our next generation of the future.”

Vice Mayor Curt Diemer urged parents to attend public budget meetings where the school board and Lynchburg City Council meet jointly to review requests and timelines.

Students and their teachers along with school and community leaders are celebrating the newest Department of Defense Education Activity school in Europe and across the agency. Sembach Elementary School opened to students last month, a feat that was marked with balloons, confetti and a ribbon cutting on Friday at the school on Sembach Kaserne, a U.S. Army post northeast of Kaiserslautern. The facility serves about 240 students in grades pre-kindergarten through fifth grade alongside about 45 staff members, according to DODEA. The $57 million project took just under four years to complete. The new building replaced the old Sembach school, which opened in 1974 and served more than 1,000 students in kindergarten through ninth grade.

Aging heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) systems in schools can lead to reduced indoor air quality (IAQ), poor student health and educational performance, increased costs, and limited capacity to support community needs during extreme weather events. According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control, improved ventilation in schools reduces airborne illness transmission, but school districts face persistent barriers to updating antiquated and inefficient systems, including limited staff capacity, fragmented access to technical guidance and funding opportunities, and difficulty navigating financing options and delivery models.
With this in mind, three U.S.-based nonprofits – Center for Green Schools at the U.S. Green Building Council, the National Center on School Infrastructure, and New Buildings Institute – have formed The HVAC Change Lab, a partnership to improve health, safety, and academic success by upgrading HVAC systems in schools.
 

The Logan County School District is moving forward with a comprehensive review of its infrastructure and safety needs, a process intended to ensure that every student in the county has access to modern and secure learning environments.

During a public forum held on Feb. 24, the district’s Local Planning Committee continued work on a new District Facilities Plan. This mandated planning process allows the district to prioritize construction and renovation projects based on current building conditions and student population trends across all elementary and secondary schools.

Superintendent Dan Costellow noted that while the district could have waited longer to initiate this update, the decision was made to be proactive.

"The current District Facilities Plan was developed in 2019 and updated in 2023," Costellow said. "While Logan County Schools could have waited another year to develop this plan, we believed it was important for both our school community and the community at large to fully understand the scope of facility needs across the county. Our goal is to ensure safe, high-quality learning spaces that will serve our students well for decades to come."

The New Hampshire Public School Infrastructure Commission awarded $8 million to fund school safety projects at at 149 schools across the state, according to a news release from the New Hampshire Department of Education. The funding comes from the Security Action for Education (SAFE) grants program and this round of funding focused on projects that “enhance surveillance, emergency alerting and access control” at schools.

Those projects include installing exterior cameras, camera monitors, locks, bollards, gates, fencing, blue light emergency alerting systems, public address phone systems and exterior door alarms, according to a description of the grant application process.

Hundreds of schools, child cares, parks and other care facilities around San Diego County are located near idle oil wells, which can emit toxic gases, a new study finds.

They’re among the nearly 4,500 wells statewide that an analysis of state data by the Center for Biological Diversity found are within 3,200 feet of such sensitive locations. That’s the minimum distance state law requires new oil and gas drilling to be from such sites.

Idle wells no longer produce oil or gas, but because they remain unplugged, they can emit explosive gases like methane and toxic chemicals like benzene, said Emily Diaz-Loar, a staff scientist at the environmental nonprofit. The group has pushed to speed up capping idle wells.

California has prohibited new drilling within 3,200 feet of these sensitive sites based on studies of the health harms of pollutants coming from oil and gas activity. Idle wells can also release harmful pollutants, yet thousands of idle wells remain unplugged within these health protection zones.

Addressing years of deferred maintenance is paying off for the Guam Department of Education (GDOE) which has seen significant improvement in the results of sanitary inspections renewals for school year 2025-2026 with the near perfect rating obtained by Agueda Johnston Middle School.

The push to improve the condition of Guam's public schools followed a big U.S. Department of Education push to return students to safe and healthy learning environments after the COVID-19 pandemic, spurring local efforts to enforce compliance with the Department of Public Health and Social Services Division of Environmental Health's school building sanitary codes mandated by local law.

Agueda was initially one of the schools identified as Tier III, meaning it required extensive work to bring the decades-old facilities into compliance.

Maine’s long-running school construction crisis may finally have a roadmap.
A state commission that has spent more than a year studying how Maine builds and renovates public schools released its final report Friday, calling for a major shift in how the state plans, funds and manages school construction projects.

Last year, the Governor’s Commission on School Construction estimated it would take roughly $11 billion to repair or replace hundreds of aging school buildings across the state, but commissioners say the price tag is only part of the problem.
The larger issue, they argue, is that the current system isn’t built to handle the scale of the need.
This marks the first time in 25 years that Maine is conducting a full study of how school construction projects are funded.
In 2024, the CBS13 I-Team surveyed every public school district in Maine and found the average age of a school building in Maine is 54 years. Of Maine’s roughly 600 public schools, the commission estimates that 500 will need replacement or significant renovation by 2045.
Some schools struggle with aging heating systems, poor ventilation, accessibility issues and outdated classroom layouts that no longer match modern educational standards.
At the same time, limited state bonding capacity and tight local budgets mean many projects wait years to move forward, if they move at all.
 

The message from Montana’s school maintenance directors to lawmakers is straightforward: “We need help.” Several spoke before members of the School Funding Interim Commission this month, including Helena Public Schools’ facility director Todd Verrill.

He told lawmakers the district’s deferred maintenance bill had ballooned to more than $100 million before voters approved a major building overhaul last year. Verrill says the school was doing its best with scant resources.

“If I sound like I’m angry, folks, I am. I come from the military where there’s a $900 billion budget per year at the federal level, and we’re scraping for pennies to educate our children,” Verrill said.

New data from national school infrastructure advocates backed up the administrators’ concerns. The 21st Century School Fund found Montana pays $100 million less than it needs to annually keep up with basic school maintenance like fixing faucets, replacing light fixtures and keeping the heat on.

Concerned parents and educators gathered to discuss the Philadelphia School District's $2.8 billion Facilities Master Plan Friday night with school leaders, including Superintendent Tony Watlington. 

The plan, if approved, proposes investments across ten city council districts. 

The proposal would close 20 schools, modernize 159 school facilities, improve building conditions, and expand access to high-quality academic and extracurricular opportunities citywide.

"I am just glad folks are coming out to give their imprint in a plan so the plan can be better," Dr. Robin Cooper said.

This is just one stop of the public listening sessions before Watlington's presentation to the Board of Education on Feb. 26.

People who attended were able to offer suggestions and ask questions. The goal was to engage directly with the communities most impacted.

The proposed plan created mixed reaction among parents and educators. While some feel it's positive, not everyone was on board.

Vermont school districts are more than $480 million in debt from the costs of renovating school buildings, according to data from the State Aid for School Construction Advisory Board. That might sound pretty steep, but experts say it’s not necessarily a bad thing.

Vermont has some of the oldest school building stock in the country. That debt means that at least some districts have started investing in school renovation projects that, with current inflation rates, may have been far costlier had they started today, Michael Gaughan, the head of the Vermont Bond Bank, told lawmakers last month.

Lawmakers might consider themselves lucky — until they look at the several billion dollars needed to bring the rest of the state’s building stock into the 21st century. Not to mention how districts might feel about taking on debt their voters never authorized.