Maybe your child’s classroom leaked during this year’s winter storms or shut down early — or entirely — during recent heat waves.
This guide is for parents and families that want to better understand the condition of their child’s school — and how to advocate to get it fixed.
My school has a problem right now — how do I get help?
Start local. Your child’s teacher and the principal should be able to explain how to request repairs.
Here’s how it works in Long Beach Unified, where Alan Reising oversees facilities and operations:
Every school has a plant supervisor. This person is in charge of custodial services and investigates maintenance issues — whether they’re identified by a student, teacher, administrator, or parent. 
If the repair requires any of the district’s 85 skilled craftspeople like an electrician or plumber, the plant supervisor submits a work order to the district. These orders are categorized as emergency, urgent, or routine. 
The district prioritizes work orders based on severity. Response times vary from minutes for problems that could lead to serious injuries to “ I don't know when…but we'll get to it” for routine maintenance. 
“We don't have the latitude of having an unlimited resource budget to have individuals waiting for a call,” Reising said.
Reising, who’s also the chair of the Coalition for Adequate School Housing, says smaller and rural districts may have even fewer resources.
 

When the Idaho Statesman and ProPublica teamed up to report on crumbling school buildings last year, we recognized that it would be a challenge to capture the attention of readers and officials.

Idaho residents already knew that their own school buildings were in bad shape and that state law made it hard for districts to raise the money to fix them. We were unsure whether additional reporting would change anything.

To have a chance at impact, we set out to do the most comprehensive possible version of the story to show that the problems were statewide. We needed to take readers into schools so they could see what was broken and the effect on students and staff in a way that wouldn’t be easy to ignore. And because we couldn’t visit every school ourselves, we needed to get people in every part of the state to help us document what was happening locally.

Through ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network, we spent about nine months reporting and heard from 106 of the state’s 115 superintendents and 233 students, parents, teachers and others.

ALEXANDRIA, Va. - A school closure in Alexandria has caused concern among parents after potential lead exposure was detected at Naomi L. Brooks Elementary School. 
The school remains closed while health officials work to address the issue. 
Administrators are meeting with families, faculty, and staff to provide updates and share available resources.
The Virginia Department of Health and the Alexandria Health Department have scheduled a webinar for Tuesday at 6:30 p.m. to answer questions and provide critical health information. The meeting will be held via Zoom, and health leaders are strongly encouraging students, staff, and their families to attend.
According to the Alexandria Health Department, students and staff should get their blood lead levels tested. 
 

MADISON, Wis. — Wisconsinites in November will choose whether to approve nearly $3.5 billion in referendums to build, renovate or maintain schools across the state.

There are at least 140 referendum questions from 121 school districts on the Nov. 5 ballot, asking for around $4.29 million in funding increases for building and maintaining school facilities, covering operational costs or both, according to the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction. Many of those referendums will ask for increased revenue limits, which result in increased property tax for residents.

As part of the 121 total school districts, around 55 districts are asking for a combined $3.46 billion to cover the cost of new construction, to fund capital projects or to maintain and modernize old structures, DPI data showed.

Hundreds of public schools across Washington are located in areas where they could suffer damage in a major earthquake. But more than a decade after the state set out to evaluate school seismic risks, the information is difficult to access and harder to verify.

In the last school year, more than 378,000 students attended schools with buildings constructed before the adoption of modern seismic codes and that have no risk evaluations or retrofits, according to data from the Washington Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction obtained through a public records request. The majority of seismic risk data collected by school districts and the state is not shared with the public.

An additional 167,000 students attended schools already assessed as having “high” or “very high” seismic risks, based on their locations and building conditions.

Compiling the school seismic data is aimed at determining the scope of vulnerabilities across the state to prioritize building improvements and to inform emergency planning. 

The V.I. Board of Education expressed concern during a Saturday meeting that auxiliary agencies are not doing enough to ensure that issues with school systems and infrastructure are appropriately flagged. However, one board member expressed that the issue really lies with the lack of responsiveness by education officials.‌
“Those agencies are supposed to also walk through the schools, etc, and they’re supposed to provide citations,” said board member Winona Hendricks during the meeting. “There’s no way that a school could be without air conditioning for one year in a kitchen…the health department has not provided a citation or explanation, Fire[Service] has not,” she continued. She called for the board to obtain access to “a copy of the opening of school reports for some or all of the auxiliary agencies.”
‌The discussion arose out of recent incidents which highlighted the lack of adequate facilities to ensure smooth operations in the territory’s public schools. Problems with the lack of air conditioning in school kitchens have been reported at the St. Croix Educational Complex and the Lockhart K-8 school. The kitchen at the Eulalie Rivera Elementary School is out of commission due to a delayed rehabilitation process. Ms. Hendricks also indicated unspecified issues at the Joseph A. Gomez Elementary School that the board needed to probe.‌
 

The School Committee looked at the fiscal year 2026 capital plan, approved builder’s risk insurance and talked about goals and improvements during Thursday’s meeting.
Assistant Superintendent for Finance and Operations Susan Rothermich said the strategy with replacements is to spread them out over several years. In fiscal years with large projects like a roof replacement, those would stand alone to “make them more palatable for the community,” she said.
The district’s requests for FY 26 total $2,595,000 and include replacements for the following: $735,000 for heat, ventilation and air conditioning (HVAC); $200,000 for storefront entry doors; $60,000 for campus sewer cover; and $100,000 for system technology upgrades.
Also listed is $1.5 million for an adaptive playground located at Marathon School. Rothermich explained that the schools would be submitting a grant application to the Community Preservation Committee.
Town Meeting in fiscal year 2024 approved use of Community Preservation Funds for an engineering study as well as design and construction bid documents for the project. An Adaptive Playground Committee has been working on these items in conjunction with BETA and expects to have construction bid documents by November.
As for the other requests, Rothermich said the high school has 14 HVAC units and the middle school has eight that need to be replaced. The requests also include funds for a feasibility study for a sustainable replacement plan, she said.
 

Millions of dollars will go to improving the special education system in Flint, Mich.'s schools—part of a legal settlement meant to benefit students who were affected by dangerous levels of lead in the city’s water supply discovered nearly a decade ago.

The settlement of the class action lawsuit will dedicate $9.69 million to bolstering Flint schools’ special education system, where many of the affected students remained in the years since the water crisis. Funds and support will expand in coming years to the broader Genesee County to address the needs of families who moved outside the city after the contamination.

“This investment will have both immediate and long-term impacts to structurally improve the quality of special education services that all children in Flint and Genesee County receive,” Bonsitu Kitaba-Gaviglio, the deputy legal director for ACLU Michigan, said during a press conference Thursday on the settlement and plan. ACLU Michigan sued on behalf of families impacted by the lead crisis.

WICHITA, Kan. (KSNW) – School building consolidations are being considered across Kansas this year. The Wichita and Garden City school districts are considering merging and closing some school buildings. One much smaller community, Healy, plans to dissolve its district altogether.

The Garden City Public Schools Board of Education met Thursday night to consider whether to approve a plan to close three elementary school buildings. Following our 6 p.m. broadcast, Garden City Public Schools announced that the board rejected the recommendation in a 4-3 vote.

They are not the only ones who have thought of building consolidation this year. Across Kansas, Wichita Public School’s Board of Education voted to move forward with its facilities master plan, which would close four elementary schools.

On a grassy hillside nestled into a live oak woodland ecosystem in the San Francisco Bay Area, a group of elementary students armed with clipboards huddle around a cluster of native vegetation, sketching its craggy form and jotting down observations. There’s dirt under their fingernails and, lacking desks, their clipboards wobble precariously on their knees, but not one of them seems to care. They are completely engrossed in the landscape they’re studying.

This is a fairly typical morning at the Nueva School, where the newly built Science and Environmental Center (SEC) houses indoor-outdoor classes for lower and middle school students. Recently awarded the 2024 Green Good Design: Green Architecture award, the bustling new building is the latest net-zero carbon addition to the campus.

It’s also evidence of an increasingly vital part of our built environment: sustainable school architecture. Not just because it is infrastructure that will always be necessary—unlike, say, office buildings, as the post-pandemic years have proven—but as William Leddy, principal architect of Leddy Maytum Stacy Architects (the firm that designed the Nueva School SEC) says, thoughtful school architecture can “actually empower kids to understand that they have agency to make changes in this world.”

The next time it rains hard in Poway, the water could wash away a $70,000 investment at Black Mountain Middle School; its newly refinished gym floor. Above that shiny surface is a roof lacking the ability to keep out the weather. Not only because it’s filled with holes but also because its six rusty air conditioning units are purely decorative.

Along with educating students, Principal Darcel Glover’s mission is to keep the 50-year-old middle school campus operating. 

“You can see the wear and tear,” Glover said as he gave NBC 7 Investigates a tour of safety concerns.

Those include heavy wooden roll-out bleachers that are difficult and dangerous to move.

“There’s thousands of pinch points within here,” Glover told us. “You can get fingers caught between these bleachers. There’s a ton of cases of serious injuries with these types of bleachers.”

We couldn’t help but notice disconnected electrical wires suspended above fire doors. Those are supposed to automatically close and lock during a fire. Needless to say, they don’t.

In July 2023, 18 years after Hurricane Katrina left most of New Orleans underwater, NOLA Public Schools hosted a ribbon-cutting at the last school building reconstructed in the wake of the storm. On hand was a Who’s Who of people involved in the largest school recovery effort in U.S. history. 

The 2005 hurricane and subsequent flood destroyed or severely damaged 110 of the 126 public school buildings operating at the time. Bringing them back was a linchpin of efforts to rebuild the city. Displaced families could not return until there were classrooms to welcome their kids. 

The logistical challenges of the $2 billion effort were unprecedented. No one had ever tried to rebuild an entire school system. The Federal Emergency Management Agency was mostly in the business of repairing or replacing houses and residential buildings, and was notorious for doing so excruciatingly slowly. 

Federal law specifically prohibited taking advantage of a disaster to build something better than what had been destroyed. Decades of official neglect, however, had left most New Orleans schools moldering long before the storm. Students sat in classrooms that didn’t meet fire and electrical codes, lacked window panes and were inaccessible to people with disabilities. 

The Wake County school system needs to reverse its growing backlog of facilities maintenance — including air conditioning replacements and repairs — school board members said Tuesday. But they’re still working on a plan to do that.
Wake County schools are $214.3 million behind on updating heating, ventilation and air conditioning equipment, the board learned during its monthly facilities committee meeting Tuesday. That’s only about a quarter of the $752.2 million the district is behind on replacing or updating facility needs across its about 200 schools. Just $114 million is planned to alleviate that backlog over the next four years. Other needs don’t have funding sources for them yet.
And that’s likely an undercount of pastdue maintenance; the numbers provided by Wake on Tuesday were only for equipment that was five years past its expected lifespan.
It means the district has fallen short of maintaining its facilities based on industry standards for various equipment. Now, the cost of getting equipment back to update is $752.2 million — on top of the regular equipment maintenance the district already must do for equipment that is not yet past its life expectancy.
 

Idaho school districts could start receiving their proceeds from House Bill 521’s facilities bond next month. 

The Idaho State Building Authority (ISBA), the organization tasked with issuing the HB 521 facilities bonds, is close to finalizing the first sale in a series of bonds that will fund public school capital projects across the state, according to Wayne Meuleman, the authority’s executive director and general counsel. 

Idaho Education News recently spoke with Meuleman to learn more about the HB 521 bonds and the group that’s working behind the scenes to secure funding for needed school infrastructure upgrades. Meuleman has been an attorney for the building authority since 1975 and its executive director since 1980. 

Here’s what we found out:

Building authority tapped as $1 billion bond-issuer
After the Legislature enacted House Bill 521 this spring, the Idaho State Building Authority got to work organizing the sale of bonds that will support a grant fund for school facilities upgrades. 

The sweeping spending package invested $1.5 billion in state funds, including $1 billion for bonds backed by sales tax revenue. Each school district will get a share of the bond proceeds, which are divided through an attendance-based formula. 

Members of Local 1740 assembled a strong display of solidarity on July 25, in response to standstill contract negotiations between the union and their employer, the School Construction Authority (SCA). Representatives from DC 37, Local 1740, and the SCA attended a total of 14 bargaining sessions and were unable to come to an agreement. The previous contract expired in 2021.

The local, formed in 2018, represents architects, engineers, and other technical professionals responsible for the construction and maintenance of approximately 1,900 public school buildings in New York City. The city’s public school system is the largest in the country, servicing more than 1 million students daily.

With a 15% vacancy rate and high attrition at the agency, the workers tasked with ensuring the safety and reliability of City public schools are taking on more work to meet construction timelines for new building projects.

“There’s a revolving door. Why do people come and leave? Because they’re not getting paid their fair share, and they’re being dumped on with excessive workloads,” Local 1740 President Charles Komlo said during the rally. “Tell me anywhere in the country where an architect has 100 projects concurrently under their belt. This agency needs to have reform, and it needs a fair contract for those who are doing the work.”

Many U.S. public school buildings are in dire need of renovations, as the average age of U.S. school buildings is approximately 49 years, and an estimated 53% have never undergone any major renovations. By renovating, upgrading, and improving the resilience of school buildings, schools can maintain a safe and modern learning environment for students and faculty and be better prepared for extreme weather events exacerbated by climate change like wildfires and heat. Improving school infrastructure also saves money; one study shows that each dollar spent on renovating structures to use modern building codes can save $11, by averting post-disaster costs.  

To aid schools and districts in making these improvements, the Biden-Harris administration and Congressional Democrats have made several new sources of federal funding available through the American Rescue Plan (ARP), Bipartisan Infrastructure Law (BIL), and Inflation Reduction Act (IRA).

Investments in school infrastructure improve students’ health and academic outcomes 

Schools can make several upgrades and repairs that will benefit students’ physical health and academic success. Modern school ventilation that improves air quality and retrofitted electric school buses, for example, are proven to have benefits for students’ school attendance, test scores, and health. Natural light, functioning school heating and cooling systems, and quality classroom acoustics can help improve students’ ability to focus and better absorb information. Taking an exam on a 90-degree day, for instance, results in a 12.3% higher chance of failing than if taken on a 72-degree day, according to a study of high school students—an effect which would likely be significantly reduced by proper air conditioning. Schools must be equipped to keep students cool on hot days, as well as warm on cold days. 

The price tag on a new elementary school in Bar Harbor is $63 million. An Auburn high school completed in 2023 came in at $122 million. And at the ballot box this fall, Cape Elizabeth voters will consider a $94.7 million bond that would be used to build a new middle school and renovate the district’s elementary and high schools. 

Since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, the average price of school construction in the United States has increased by 32 percent, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. 

There is no statewide data showing the change in the average per-square-foot cost of school construction, but Maine Department of Education data of state-funded major construction projects shows how construction costs have grown in recent years. 

BRUNSWICK COUNTY — The Brunswick County school board met Friday to address the impact of Monday’s tropical cyclone and next steps toward reopening; the schools have been closed all week due to catastrophic flooding the unnamed storm caused countywide.
It left multiple people stuck in schools and stranded due to rising floodwaters. In the district, only one school, Bolivia Elementary, is currently undergoing remediation due to flooding, but should be completed by next week. 
Other schools, including South Brunswick High, South Brunswick Middle, and Southport Elementary, experienced significant damage from flooding leaks. Southport Middle School also faces sewage backups, as the entire town was under a sewer advisory.
 

The Chicago Board of Education owns more than 800 school buildings, annexes, and other property.

The average age of a Chicago public school building is 83 years and 70 schools operate in facilities built before 1900. The oldest building — James Ward Elementary — was built in 1874 and is 149 years old.

According to the district’s most recent Educational Facilities Master Plan, it would cost $14.4 billion to update and repair all of Chicago’s public school buildings, and of that, $3 billion is considered critical.

Across the nation, school buildings are considered public infrastructure owned by the community and decisions about facilities upgrades and construction typically filter through elected officials who sit on the local school board.

The bare hot asphalt schoolyard of the American past is getting a redo.

The schoolyard of the future has trees to play under, or canvas canopies to shade a climbing gym. Some have native plants to sniff during recess or fallen logs to climb over. Instead of hard ground, some are tearing out asphalt in favor of more spongy materials to absorb heavy rains.

They are all solutions to tackle not only the hazards of extreme weather but also a growing recognition that playing in nature could be good for children.

Many of these innovations are happening in some of the hottest, most climate vulnerable parts of the country, like Arizona, which this summer endured over 100 consecutive days of 100-degree Fahrenheit temperatures, or California, where some schools closed early because of record high temperatures earlier this month.