ANNE ARUNDEL COUNTY - Anne Arundel County Schools were recognized for their exemplary maintenance standards in the Interagency Commission on School Construction's (IAC) 2023 Fiscal Year report.

The commission awarded Anne Arundel County an "Adequate" rating across all 21 active facilities, amounting to an average overall score of 75.51%—the highest among Maryland school districts.

Per the report, the county boasts 121 active school facilities with an average age of 30.1 years. Combined, these facilities span an impressive 13,902,130 square feet, averaging 170 square feet per student.

The report praised Anne Arundel County for its proactive maintenance measures, emphasizing its annual inspections of roofing components to enhance structure longevity. The county also performed well in terms of safety, with all assessed schools having functional exterior doors and consistently checked emergency exits. Additionally, four schools achieved a "Superior" rating in conveyance for their impeccable chairlifts and elevators.

When the bell rings at Hurst-Euless-Bedford ISD’s L.D. Bell High School, the volleyball team heads to the locker room, changes into their athletic clothes and walks past the gymnasium to the double doors leading outside the school.

Without a court available for their practice, the team instead sets, spikes and serves on the school’s tennis court.

To address this and many other issues, including outdated school buildings, HEB ISD is seeking approval of a nearly $1 billion bond package in the upcoming Nov. 7 election.

“It’s a size issue, it’s an infrastructure issue,” Deanne Hullender, chief public relations and marketing officer for the district, said of two of the district’s high schools.

The bond aims to replace the aging L.D. Bell and Trinity High School campuses with new facilities, as well as revamp an elementary school designated to accommodate the alternative KEYS High School.

Early voting begins Oct. 23 and ends Nov. 3. The last day to register to vote is Oct. 10.

As anyone who is planning to move to a new city or neighborhood with a school-aged child knows, not all public schools are created equal. Some have shinier athletic facilities or bigger classrooms or newer equipment in the science and computer labs, all indications to anxious parents that their children will receive a superior education, which will better equip them to prosper and succeed in life.

New athletic fields and computers and improvements to school buildings all cost money, of course, which school districts raise through capital bonds, financed by property taxes. The community as a whole, even voters who don’t have kids or any connection to the school, votes on the bond issues during municipal elections. For many parents, and even many members of the community who don’t have children in local public schools, higher taxes are a price they are willing to pay for better schools.

But does every capital project lead to a better education, at least as measured by test scores? Economists have been studying this question for a few decades and have come up with widely divergent answers. Some say any educational investment is worthwhile. Others say the positive effects are greatly exaggerated. Barbara Biasi, a labor economist at Yale SOM, and her colleagues Julien Lafortune of the Public Policy Institute of California and David Schönholzer of Stockholm University suspected that the answers varied so widely because they were based on studies that looked at very different contexts.

The Los Angeles Unified School District school board is considering a resolution that would exclude 346 schools serving its most vulnerable student populations from co-location arrangements with charter schools. Doing so could potentially undermine the integrity of Proposition 39, a statewide initiative that mandates public schools to share spaces with charter schools.
The resolution, authored by President Jackie Goldberg and member Rocio Rivas and discussed at a meeting Tuesday, would require the district to avoid co-location offers on LAUSD’s 100 Priority Schools, Black Student Achievement Plan campuses and community schools.
According to the proposal, LAUSD would also avoid charter co-location offers that “compromise district schools’ capacity to serve neighborhood children” or “grade span arrangements that negatively impact student safety and build charter school pipelines that actively deter students from attending district schools, so that the district can focus on supporting its most fragile students and schools, key programs, and student safety.”
 

DECATUR – Teachers herd children into cars and buses at the Garfield Learning Academy in southern Decatur. 
All the students hail, though, from Dennis Lab School on the western side of the city. Their two home school buildings were shuttered this summer when Decatur Public Schools District 61 realized they had major structural problems. 
“It was shocking that all of a sudden the two buildings were condemned and that they couldn’t hold classes in them anymore,” said grandfather John Shores, Jr. 
Even with a long family history at Dennis, he did not expect the disrepair to be so bad. 
“As a board member and parent, I did not know the Dennis buildings were as bad as they were,” said DPS Board of Education member Kevin Collins-Brown. 
“It seemed to come out of nowhere.”
State-required inspections missed the danger
Decatur Public Schools had completed the inspections required by the state, but the reports did not turn up any signs of danger. 
Illinois requires school districts to bring outside an architecture firm or another expert into each school every 10 years to check smoke detectors, tripping hazards and other code violations. 
Dennis was inspected in 2013. The only clues were tiles popping and doors unable to close, according to University of Illinois structural engineering professor James LaFave. 
“It does not seem that this 10-Year Health/Life Safety inspection is by itself likely to tease out structural engineering shortcomings,” LaFave said. 
According to an emailed statement from the Illinois State Board of Education, the 10-Year Health/Life Safety survey will not catch structural issues – unless they are manifesting in a visible way. 

ALLENTOWN, Pa. — Since 2018, six local school districts have reported unacceptable levels of lead in their water, and one expert says some of the remediation methods they used are less than perfect.
Allentown, Easton Area, Parkland and Southern Lehigh school districts, and Bethlehem Vocational-Technical School and Carbon Lehigh Intermediate Unit 21 have received at least one lead violation in their water since 2018, according to the state Education Department.

A recent report from EnvironmentAmerica and the Public Interest Research Group gave Pennsylvania a failing grade in regard to its regulation and treatment of lead in schools’ water.

“Pennsylvania law provides that schools must test at least some taps for lead annually, but a loophole allows school districts to avoid this requirement simply by discussing the issue at a public meeting," the report from EnvironmentAmerica and the Public Interest Research Group states.

After one of the deadliest wildfires in U.S. history, Philip Raya, his wife and two young children drove through the wreckage of Lahaina – looking at bodies and the ashes of the town they once called home – enroute to a new start on the other side of Maui.
There were many devastating sights. Their longtime neighborhood school, King Kamehameha III Elementary, had burned down. The green-painted oceanfront campus lived next to the community's treasured Banyan Tree.
For the family kids, Isabella, 8, and Niko, 6, the destruction is incomprehensible.
"We get questions from our kids: When are we going go back to our old school? And when are we going to go back to our own house? We don’t really have the answers," Raya said. "These are uncharted waters for us."
An increase of natural disasters from wildfires to floods to hurricanes to tornadoes – exacerbated by climate change – have ravaged America’s schools since students returned to in-person learning after the COVID-19 pandemic. And manmade disasters from lead in drinking water to asbestos in school buildings are playing a role.
This school year alone, devastating wildfires exacerbated by winds from Hurricane Dora ravaged one school and damaged three others in Maui. And winds from category three Hurricane Idalia destroyed the roof of an elementary school in Hoboken, Georgia. Kids attending schools without air conditioning were sent home at the beginning of the school year in Puerto Rico, Philadelphia and in other areas of the mid-Atlantic and Northeast because of extreme heat.
 

One of the hardest hit schools in the Eastern Kentucky floods is slated to reopen by August 2024, Perry County school administrators told parents at a local school board meeting Thursday. When widespread deadly flooding devastated multiple Eastern Kentucky counties in July 2022, Squabble Creek crested its banks and destroyed the interior of the rural K-12 Buckhorn School.
Since the flood, Buckhorn students have been attending classes at the old A.B. Combs Elementary School — resulting in more than an hour-long, one-way bus ride for kids living in the furthest reaches of the county. Before the flood, Buckhorn had over 300 students, data from the Kentucky Department of Education showed. A collection of parents and other supporters of the Buckhorn School packed a local school board meeting Thursday to request an update on the construction of the school.
 

BIBB COUNTY, Ga. (WGXA) - The Bibb County Board of Education approved funding at its meeting Thursday for renovations and upgrades at several District schools.

The Board voted to seek state capital funds for renovations at Howard Middle and Howard High Schools. The aging schools are part of the District's long-term facilities improvement plan. Additional funding will come from a sales tax approved by voters in 2019.

Approval was also granted to revise capital funding applications for completed renovations at Heritage Elementary, Ingram-Pye Elementary, and Lane Elementary. The changes reflect shifts in project scopes during the planning process.

Heritage's application was revised as roof, serving line, dishwasher, and HVAC upgrades were ultimately not completed. At Ingram-Pye, a similar shift occurred. At Lane Elementary, planned bus and car rider canopies were not finished.

OMAHA, Neb. —
Omaha Public Schools made renovations and upgrades through a bond program passed by voters.
The bond program happened in two phases, first in 2014 when voters approved $421 million and again in 2018 with another $409 million.
Friday, the district showed off some of the new renovations at Spring Lake Elementary and Lewis and Clark Middle School.
One big change done to Lewis and Clark is moving the entrance to the former back of the building.
Walking inside its halls is like walking through time, you can see how the school looked when it first opened in the 60s and where the updates begin.
The renovations include larger classrooms, easily moveable furniture and storm-safe doors.
Chief Operations and Talent Officer Charles Wakefield said changes focused a lot on the guts of the older buildings, like replacing boilers and plumbing.

Poor air quality makes risk of spread of COVID-19 and other respiratory illnesses 'much higher,' says expert.
More than two weeks into the school year, New Brunswick has released the school air quality test results from 2022-23.
Twenty-nine of the 35 public schools tested last winter had peak carbon dioxide levels above the Department of Education's threshold of 1,500 parts per million (ppm), shown in results posted online and included at the end of this story.
Two of the schools had levels more than double that, including Anglophone West School District's George Street Middle School in Fredericton, which had the highest peak reading in the province at 3,418 ppm, as well as the highest average reading, at 1,709 ppm.
Carbon dioxide, or CO2, is an odourless, colourless, non-flammable gas commonly created indoors when people exhale.
It's used as a proxy to measure air quality and the rate at which air is being renewed, which can also serve as a warning sign about the risk of spread of COVID-19 and other respiratory illnesses, according to experts.
 

The Capital Improvement Program for the 2025 fiscal year was approved by the Worcester County Board of Education at their meeting Tuesday.

Facilities Planner Joe Price presented the program outline to the board, stating that every year they are required to submit a CIP to the State of Maryland Interagency Commission on School Construction. The six-year plan allows the commission to identify public school construction needs so they can move establish a reasonable schedule for funding and implementation.

The program for the 2025 fiscal year included a summary of previously approved projects as well as requests for state construction funding for ongoing projects, including Snow Hill Middle School/Cedar Chapel Special School roof replacement project, and design funding for the Pocomoke Elementary School roof replacement project.

Park Middle School was one of 17 K-12 schools across the nation to be recognized by the U.S. Department of Energy for its efforts to conserve energy and create a healthier and more sustainable building.
Park, with money from a 2020 Lincoln Public Schools bond issue, completed a $20 million project to improve the building’s energy efficiency and indoor air quality. As a result, it was one of the first schools to be recognized by the department’s Efficient and Healthy Schools campaign.
The campaign was created in 2021 to aid schools across the country in implementing green practices to limit facilities’ energy use and carbon emissions and cut utility bills. This was the first year the campaign honored schools for their efforts.
Park’s project — which took around two and a half years to complete — is part of a much bigger plan for schools across the district. LPS has been working for years to convert schools from a boiler chiller system to a more environmentally friendly geothermal one.
 

Cumberland County Schools are watching the delivery date for three HVAC units, hoping they can arrive before Sept. 30.

That’s the cutoff to obligate funds for the second round of the Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief Fund, or ESSER.

“We have four rooftop units that have yet to ship,” Kim Chamberlin with Upland Design told the school board’s building and grounds committee Sept. 11. “One of those is supposed to be coming fairly quickly. The other three are not shipping until the end of October.”

Cumberland County budgeted $2.3 million for replacement of HVAC units and controls across the county’s school facilities.

All ESSER 2.0 funds are to be obligated by Sept. 30, 2023, and spent by Dec. 15, 2023, as recommended by the Tennessee Department of Education to allow time for grants to be closed. Funds are considered obligated when the school system commits the money to a specific purpose, such as contracts, services, materials or subscriptions. Liquidation is when a purchased item or service has occurred and payment has been made.

Chamberlin said he has been asking all contractors on projects to keep records of when items are ordered to document supply chain challenges on the federal projects.

CORDOVA, Ala. (WIAT) — Some parents in Cordova are raising concerns about the Walker County Board of Education’s recent proposal to combine Cordova Elementary School and Bankhead Middle School.
The elementary school was set to be rebuilt, but now parents said this new plan is an easy fix to save money.
“To me, it feels like a band aid on a broken bone,” Scott Murphy said.
Murphy’s kids attend both schools. He said he was upset when he got wind of the changes.
“Within the last two weeks it’s been made a little more public,” Murphy said. “But before that, it was super hush-hush.”
According to Cordova Mayor Jeremy Pate, Cordova Elementary School was approved for a new school building in the board of education’s capital plan back in 2019. Now, the school board is proposing a new plan.
“They’ve been waiting for 10 years, and now they’ve come up with a plan that’s not a new school,” Pate said. “It’s just adding their school on to a 40-year-old building.”
 

Thirteen Poway Unified campuses are getting solar panel structures, which are projected to save the district around $33.7 million over the next 20 years in electricity payments, according to officials.

The installations began over the summer, with some projects completed and others scheduled through early next year. The solar panels will be turned on in May or June 2024, said Ruben Arras, the district’s director of facilities, maintenance and operations.

The project is possible through a power purchase agreement among ForeFront Power, a company that owns and installs the panels; San Diego Gas & Electric and Poway Unified. The district will be leasing the panels from ForeFront, which will sell the electricity generated to SDG&E. In exchange, the district will have a guaranteed flat kilowatt charge for the next two decades, Arras said, which will protect it from increasing electricity costs.

GREENWICH — In its first public view, the draft of the 2025 capital budget is more than $118 million and covers school renovation projects, HVAC upgrades and more. 
The Greenwich Board of Education reviewed the document for the first time last week. Blaize Levitan, the district’s chief operating officer, said the starting point for the 2025 capital budget is what the Representative Town Meeting and Board of Estimate and Taxation appropriated for the 2024 budget.
“This will be the first draft and there’s going to be some items that are still very fluid on here,” Levitan said. Schools Superintendent Toni Jones "mentioned that we are really doing a lot of studying and understanding where some of our infrastructure is standing now.”
 

Three numbers tell the story of school infrastructure in Memphis: 32, 40, 64.
The average age of school buildings in Shelby County municipal school districts is 32 years old.
Nationally, the recommended life span of a school building is 40 years.
The average age of school buildings in Memphis-Shelby County Schools is 64 years old.
MSCS students attend classes in buildings that are, on average, 24 years past the functional recommendation, and twice as old as their peers in the suburbs. This disparity is inherently separate and unequal.
A statewide assessment of school infrastructure is a needed first step to identify and address the inequitable education landscape across Tennessee. A child’s ZIP code should not determine if their school is updated or outdated.
 

LYNN, Mass. (WBZ NewsRadio) — Officials in Lynn are asking the state for help to give its school buildings a long overdue update.
Lynn Mayor Jared Nicholson and school officials urged members of the Joint Committee on Education on Monday to support bills that would overhaul the funding model for the Massachusetts School Building Authority with the goal of getting major upgrades to school buildings.
The bills, called Acts Modernizing School Construction, are set to change the way schools are funded. The reforms would alter the state's school construction formula giving low-income students equitable access to modern buildings and double the money dedicated to school construction projects.
Lynn School Superintendent Evonne Alvarez said 41% of Lynn's school buildings are over a hundred years old. Another 26% of the buildings are between 71 and 100 years old.
"Those outdated infrastructures of our school buildings hinder the ability to provide 21st-century education," Alvarez said. "It sends a clear message to our students and community that equity is often mentioned but not taken seriously by a system that should be funding equitable access to education."
She told the committee that the schools are in dire need of an upgrade as the decades-old buildings are negatively impacting students' education.
 

The Alamance County board of commissioners voted unanimously to hire engineers and assess heating, ventilation and air conditioning systems within both the Alamance-Burlington schools and Alamance County facilities.

The board in a 3-2 vote Sept. 18 approved fund requests totaling $301,980 for the Alamance-Burlington School District so that the district can fund roofing repairs at B. Everett Jordan Elementary, Western High and Western Middle Schools. 

Since ABSS has no taxing authority, all funds for the school district go through the County Commissioners, who then give money to ABSS

According to the board of commissioners, Western Alamance High School has significant leaks throughout the building. Graham Middle School is also on the board’s radar for having roofing issues, according to ABSS. 

In the wake of the discovery of mold in August, Builder Services Inc. of North Carolina was hired to conduct remediation services inside ABSS facilities. Ben Bass, the executive vice president of Builder Services spoke before the county commissioners about the mold remediation roof leaks.