More than 10,800 K-12 schools representing more than 7 million students across the United States now use solar energy, helping schools lower electricity costs, invest more resources in students and strengthen their communities, according to a new report from clean energy nonprofit Generation180.
The sixth edition of “Brighter Future: The State of Solar & Battery Storage in U.S. K-12 Schools“ finds that total solar capacity on K-12 schools has more than tripled since 2016. Together, these schools have more than 2.4 GW of solar, enough to power more than 450,000 homes.
 

Portland Public Schools is fighting a stack of lawsuits over Benson Polytechnic High School's construction, with subcontractors claiming they are owed millions of dollars and the district accusing its own general contractor of causing serious construction errors. The career and technical education magnet school in northeast Portland, which enrolls about 1,000 students, reopened in fall 2024 after a modernization that ballooned from an original $269 million budget to a final cost of $410 million, a $141 million overrun.

More than 100 Houston ISD schools are still operating far below capacity — even after the district closed a dozen campuses last school year, according to district data released this summer.

Last year, HISD closed or consolidated 12 campuses, citing larger-than-expected enrollment declines and aging facilities. But more than 100 schools that opened their doors this school year are operating under 60% capacity, according to 2025-26 district data. 

State-appointed Superintendent Mike Miles has said HISD could lose $50 to $60 million in state funding every year due to enrollment declines “unless things drastically change.” He said in February the district also could have closed up to 40 campuses based on aging facility conditions alone, which often prove costly to repair and replace.

Jacksonville Elementary School, closed since last week for professional mold cleaning, will remain closed through Friday.

The school has been closed since Wednesday, Aug. 19, after tests revealed elevated mold levels in several parts of the building.

The Jacksonville/North Pulaski School District has since received the results of air quality testing and has “been given the green light” regarding the air inside the building, according to a Wednesday afternoon statement from the district.

The school remains closed, however, as it waits for replacement parts for its dedicated outdoor air systems, according to the statement. A dedicated outdoor air system is a type of HVAC unit that circulates fresh outdoor air into the building after filtering, dehumidifying and conditioning it.

St. Louis Public Schools presented a revised proposal Tuesday to close 14 schools by next year, down from an initial plan to shutter 20 buildings.

The district is trying to stabilize its future in the face of declining enrollment and state funding as well as increased competition from charter schools. It's navigating a projected $41 million deficit for this school year and is expected to run out of savings by 2030 if a plan to significantly curtail spending isn’t put into place, according to the Missouri State Auditor’s office.

The new proposal dubbed the “A+ portfolio model” expands traditional structure for schools, which include pre-kindergarten through fifth grade elementary schools, six through eighth grade middle schools and high schools that serve ninth through 12th graders.

The district will also introduce some schools for pre-kindergarten through eighth grade students.

Eleven elementary schools are slated for closure, including Hamilton, Ashland, Ames, Hickey, Wallbridge, Carver, Columbia, Patrick Henry, Meramec, Monroe and Shenandoah.

Students are back in classrooms across Philadelphia, but this school year also marks the beginning of major changes for the School District of Philadelphia — from a multibillion-dollar facilities plan and school closures to a nearly $300 million structural deficit and a continued push to improve student achievement.

Superintendent Tony Watlington, now beginning his fifth school year leading the district, sat down one-on-one with CBS News Philadelphia to discuss where the district is headed and what families should expect in the years ahead.

The school board has approved a $3 billion facilities plan that includes closing 17 schools in the coming years. The plan will affect communities across Philadelphia, including Kensington, and Watlington acknowledged how difficult the prospect of a school closure can be for families.

"I would not want my own child's school to close. Period. The end," Watlington said.

Rural schools are asked to solve national problems with local resources. They are expected to close readiness gaps they did not create, respond to poverty they cannot control, and provide opportunities students may not receive anywhere else. Yet these expectations are often placed inside buildings designed for a different era of education.

The physical school environment is usually treated as an operational concern: square footage, maintenance, compliance, safety and cost. Those matters are real. But they are incomplete.

A school building is also an instructional system.

In my rural Midwestern school district, we drew on research in learning environments and early literacy development to create a new 108,000-square-foot elementary school that serves 900 pupils across 932 square miles.

We used the Opportunity-by-Design Framework, which connects physical design to instructional capacity, student experience, measurable outcomes, and equity impact.

Montgomery County Public Schools has seen declining enrollment over the past year, and officials expect that trend to continue.
That’s prompted school officials to study possible closings and consolidations of elementary and middle schools.
According to an enrollment update included in a presentation at the MCPS Board of Education meeting on July 16, the student population for the 2026-27 school year is projected to reach 150,746 students.

Belvidere School District 100 is working through a $70 million renovation plan to address urgent maintenance needs across its school facilities.

The proposed upgrades represent phase two of the district’s facilities master plan, which first launched in 2022. The funding would address projects with years of deferred maintenance, including replacing HVAC systems and remodeling bathrooms.

A team of stakeholders consisting of community representatives, staff, students and school board members identified the immediate facility needs across the district. The proposed renovations focus primarily on some of the district’s oldest school facilities: Belvidere High School, South Middle School, Caledonia and Washington Elementary.

District leadership discussed multiple options to fund the proposed projects without relying on additional funding from local property owners. Proposed funding sources include money previously set aside in the district’s capital fund, alongside revenues from bond sales and sales tax.

While some countries struggle with school design policy, innovative architects are demonstrating that a healthy learning environment with plenty of light and natural materials means happier children and long-term economic benefits.

Depicting schools in films is easy. They feature strip lighting, mile-long corridors, hard surfaces and cavernous spaces that echo the noise of a thousand feet and voices. They are rectangular blocks, brick and mortar incarnations of “the institution” designed to oppress not impress, places of indoctrination more than education. And this popular depiction isn’t just a Hollywood fantasy; it’s what most people remember from childhood. Compared with other types of public building, schools have remained in this institutional design rut for a long time.

Municipal governments deemed them unworthy of investment in good quality design, materials and furnishings – and so schools have been slow to capture the imagination of progressive architects.

Since 2019, public school enrollments have dropped by 2.8%, or 1.4 million students as of 2024, according to National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) data. Several factors have driven the decline in public school students, including fewer births, shifting migration trends, and a more competitive education marketplace. The latest NCES forecasts project public schools losing an additional 1.3 million students by 2031. 

The enrollment trend and forecast are grim news for school districts. Enrollments dropped in all but 10 states from 2019 to 2024. Going forward, school districts in every state will likely have to cut costs, and many will need to close schools to reduce budget deficits related to reduced enrollment and the need to right-size.

Michigan lawmakers commissioned a study in 2023 that found the state’s public schools need about $22.8 billion in infrastructure money

Michigan Department of Education recently awarded $224 million in grants, and there will be another $100 million in infrastructure grants that are part of the state’s 2027 fiscal year budget

Many districts that missed out on grant money will ask voters to approve bonds during the November election

WASHINGTON (DC News Now) — DC Public Schools (DCPS) students head back to the classroom in just over a week, and crews are busy ensuring every school is ready to welcome those students back.

"T-minus 10 days, in fact, the first day of school is Monday, August 24," said Delano Hunter, director of the DC Department of General Services (DGS). "We're busy and active across our portfolio, across 117 schools, and our work spans the gamut from small painting jobs to full modernizations and brand-new schools."

Enrollment has fallen dramatically over two decades. In many Los Angeles communities, schools provide more than education—they provide meals, after-school programs and a place for children to spend time while parents work.

A study by Brown University researchers found that 44% of pre-K-12 schools in the U.S. are within a mile of a known environmental hazard site, a distance at which negative exposure effects are well documented.

For years, it rained inside Prince Edward Elementary School.

Photographs show the large plastic buckets and trash bins teachers and school staff would set out on rainy days to catch the water seeping through the ceiling and dampening walls. By 2022, at least three rooms in the part of the school built in the 1980s had been rendered unusable due to water damage and mildew. 

When a new school opens or a major renovation is completed, success is often measured by whether the project was delivered on time, on budget, and ready for occupancy. Those milestones matter. But for facility leaders, another question quickly follows: How will this building perform five, 10, or 20 years from now?

Dearborn Public Schools officially launched an informational campaign for a historic $1.51 billion bond proposal that will appear on the November 3, 2026 ballot.

The proposal lays out a 20-year plan to replace or renovate every single school in the district all without raising the overall property tax rate for Dearborn homeowners.

Homeowners in the small portion of Dearborn Heights served by Dearborn Public Schools will see a slight tax increase.

NEWNAN, Ga. — Arnco-Sargent Elementary sits in a wooded area on a two-lane road about 50 miles south of Atlanta. Across the street is a child care center. A Baptist church is less than a mile away.

But if developers get their way, the school’s newest neighbor could be a sprawling data center campus housing the networking infrastructure needed to help power Americans’ reliance on the internet, and increasingly, artificial intelligence.

The Norris School District is a 270-acre campus about 12 miles south of Lincoln. Tucked in between some agricultural land are the district’s four buildings — an elementary, intermediate, middle and high school — along with a district office housed in the high school.

When visitors walk up to any of the main entrances, they step through a first set of doors and then hit a button to buzz into the second set. An office worker will speak through the intercom to verify who is there and why. Then they meet another set of doors by the central office.