CLINTON, Tenn. (WATE) — At schools across East Tennessee, the books are organized on the shelves, the walls and lockers decorated, and even the playdough is out and ready to be molded by the youngest of students.
“To educate a student you have to have a great environment. If the environment is not good, then there is a problem,” said Director of Anderson County Schools Dr. Tim Parrott.
For nine years, Parrott has overseen a number of projects with Anderson County Schools. One of which, keeping the county’s 18 facilities up and running.
“We do a lot of stuff in house,” said Parrott. “We have our own heat and air, our own electrician. We have our own plumbers and everything like that. So, a lot of it is done in house.”
This past spring, health inspectors graded 11 of Anderson County’s 18 schools. Nine of the eleven graded out with a score of 99 or better.
“Bottom line is, we’ve got good facilities. Climate control and all the things like that to make sure that the environment is conducive to teaching.”
 

SAN PABLO, Calif. - It’s a day of celebration for one community in the West Contra Costa School District. Lake Elementary School, which was almost closed a decade ago, has been rebuilt, and part of the new campus opened today.
The first day of school in the West Contra Costa Unified School District isn't until Monday, but dozens of parents, teachers, and students gathered today to celebrate the campus reopening. 
The original Lake Elementary opened in 1957. In 2009, district budget issues nearly led to its closure, but parents and teachers stepped in to save it.
"Patricia was at the forefront of parents and teachers telling the school district to find the money," said Kristen Jones, a West Contra Costa Unified School District teacher who used to teach third grade at Lake Elementary. 
Her friend, Patricia Ponce had three kids at Lake Elementary at the time when she led the community-wide effort to challenge the school board and district and keep the school open. 
 

When Lois Brink’s kids were in elementary school, she remembers being struck by how uninviting their schoolyard was. She described it as “scorched earth” — little more than a dirt field coated in “I don’t know how many decades of weed retardant” and some aging play equipment. But Brink, a landscape architect and professor at the University of Colorado Denver, didn’t just see a problem. She saw fertile ground for a solution. Over the next dozen years, she helped lead a transformation of nearly 100 elementary school grounds across Denver into more vibrant, greener spaces, dubbed “Learning Landscapes.”

Public schools alone cover about 2 million acres of land in the U.S. Although comprehensive data is hard to come by, the “scorched earth” that Brink witnessed is the norm in many places — according to the Trust for Public Land, around 36 percent of the nation’s public school students attend school in what would be considered a heat island. And as with green spaces writ large, a dearth of schoolyard trees and other vegetation tends to be most common in lower-income areas and Black and brown neighborhoods.

JONESBORO — During a recent public hearing about the Clayton County Board of Education millage rate, a local substitute teacher spoke before the board not only about the tax rate but about some school facilities being in disrepair.
“Being a substitute teacher in Clayton County, I have noticed that there are a lot of things that go unrepaired in our schools,” Shawana Jackson said during a July 29 public hearing.
She told school board members some of the maintenance issues included mold, carpet, pests and roof leaks.
“Nothing is being done,” she said.
In an email to the Clayton News, school system leaders and others, Jackson specifically cited problems at Callaway Elementary, Kemp Primary, Suder Elementary and Tara Elementary.
“My concern is for our children,” she said at the July 29 meeting.
In a July 29 work session, school board Chair Jessie Goree said she had also been made aware of a flooding issue at the Professional Learning Center and there were carpet issues at the Performing Arts Center. She added that there needs to be some renovations at the PAC, including lighting and sound.
 

ORANGEBURG, S.C. — Orangeburg County School District was awarded $40 million dollars from the South Carolina Department of Education to build a new Robert E. Howard Elementary School.
The current Robert E. Howard Middle School will be demolished and replaced with a new, state-of-the-art elementary school that will be filled with students from Brookdale, Mellichamp and Whittaker elementary schools.
Orangeburg County School District Superintendent Shawn Foster says population decline plays a role in the consolidation of three elementary schools.
“Orangeburg County had upwards of 19,000 students. We’ve seen that steady decline down to little over 10,000, so with the change in populations, we have to make the tough decisions to make sure we’re most effectively using tax payers dollars but also keeping up with the educational needs and the infrastructure needs to ensure our kids receive a high quality educational experience,” Foster said.
Atiqua Brooks is a mom of a student who goes to Brookdale Elementary. She says they are excited for the new school.
 

The vast majority of school safety plans require administrators to lock exterior doors and limit building access, through protocols like ID checks for visitors.
In Texas, teams of inspectors visit every campus to make sure schools actually practice what they preach.
In unannounced visits, unarmed state employees conduct intruder audits to see if they can get into school buildings and, if they can, how long it takes to do so.
In sometimes divisive debates over school safety, limiting building access is one of the most commonly agreed upon strategies. But all it takes is a few bad habits—propping open a door during recess or waving a visitor past an ID check—for the most well-intentioned plans to fail, said Amy Klinger, co-founder of the Educator’s School Safety Network, an organization that consults with schools on safety plans.
“There is great value in having a fresh set of eyes look at your school,” said Klinger, who contracts with districts in other parts of the country to conduct vulnerability audits that included unannounced intruder tests. “We have to be careful that it doesn’t devolve into a ‘gotcha,’ but instead it’s being used as a mechanism for improvement.”
 

SAN ANTONIO - The San Antonio Independent School District says it only experienced minor air conditioning problems as classes got underway this week. Heating and cooling failures caused school closures and resignations at the district last year. The News 4 I-Team has uncovered the district still hasn't resolved a maintenance backlog that was a major factor behind the outages.
The I-Team requested records showing SAISD still has a total of 4,765 open work orders for buildings across the district. Of those, 1,725 are for heating and cooling equipment that needs repair. 1,081 are for plumbing problems at schools and support buildings.
As parents and students returned to Highland Hills Elementary Tuesday they were reminded of the AC problems last school year.
“Quite a few times they sent the kids home from school because it was hot and at meet the teacher everybody was dripping sweat really bad,” said parent Corina Hernandez.
 

WILKES-BARRE, LUZERNE COUNTY(WOLF) — The discovery of lead contamination was reported to the Hanover Area School District while they were in the process of removing existing paint. Dust containing lead migrated into areas of the bleacher system.

Superintendent Nathan Barret informed the community they found lead contamination during a scheduled renovation project to repaint the home bleachers at the Hanover Area School’s Memorial Stadium.

“We knew there was lead paint in there. There was lead paint remediation scheduled for it. As the process was going through there was a slight compromise in one of the ceiling vents that contaminated a storage area we hadn’t anticipated,” saidBarret.

No one is in immediate danger, but the project has to be cleaned up by an environmental scientist at this point. This will delay the different stages of the project to about 4-6 weeks.

Now, the athletes are in jeopardy of playing on the football field.

Four San Antonio Independent School District schools shuttered over the summer are already being reopened as “swing campuses” where students will be transported in the event temperatures become too hot at their home campuses.

The contingency is one of three developed in response to aging HVAC infrastructure, which buckled during a winter freeze in January, prompting a facilities assessment and overhaul of the district’s operations department.

As part of that overhaul, the district created a dashboard, where conditions can be monitored by district staff in realtime. It’s color-coded based on conditions with green for fully operational and red for ongoing issues.

A flurry of activity has been under way this summer at buildings around the Lincoln County School District School.

The Lincoln County Leader reached out for specific information about the nearly $1.5 million in projects and received the following details from the LCSD Facilities Director Rich Belloni, Business Services Director Kim Cusick, and Superintendent Dr. Majalise Tolan.

Oceanlake Elementary School — creating a new entrance to the student drop-off and pick-up driveway on 21st Street, allowing two lanes of traffic in the off-street parking/drop-off area. This should alleviate traffic congestion around the school during drop-off and pick-up times. This is being done in conjunction with Lincoln City’s grant project to add sidewalks along 21st Street. Also, two classrooms received new flooring, and asbestos tile was abated in those classrooms.

The Tuscaloosa County Schools system is working to get rid of mold in one of the district's elementary schools.
A statement was sent out to Englewood Elementary parents explaining that the lunchroom seating area would be renovated.
The district said moisture was found in the seating area about a week ago, but it is not a health or safety risk to students or staff.
Englewood elementary students are spending their lunch hour in the classrooms with grab and go style lunches.
"A plan had to made quickly to get the food to the kids and kind of redo the logistics of how kids were going to eat in the school, while this renovation is done to remedy this situation in that area," said Tuscaloosa County school system rep Terri Brewer.
 

When the air conditioning broke in a Terrebonne Parish school, it sometimes got so hot that kids fainted or had asthma attacks, and the school had to call an ambulance.
More often, the school sent kids home early. In the best-case scenario, students packed into classrooms with working AC or relocated to the gym or cafeteria to escape the southeast Louisiana heat.
So when the school district got its final federal COVID-19 relief package in 2021, school officials made fixing the AC a top priority. Nearly $23 million — more than 40% of the district's aid allotment — went to replace the most dire HVAC systems in seven schools.
"It gives us the confidence that we're not going to have to cancel school, the kids are not going to get sick," Superintendent Bubba Orgeron said. "When it's either too hot or too cold … kids are focused on that instead of learning."
Handed billions of dollars with few strings attached, thousands of school leaders made a similar calculation that year. Across 21 states with publicly available data, schools on average planned to spend 18% of their third and largest COVID-19 aid package on facilities, a Chalkbeat analysis found. That's nearly as much as they were required to spend on academic recovery.
In Mississippi, schools put nearly 40% of their final aid package toward buildings. In South Dakota, it was more than half.
As the nation takes stock of its return on this massive one-time investment, many school leaders stand behind their decision to go big on facilities, and say this will pay dividends for academics and student engagement. A growing body of research suggests a child's learning environment affects their test scores and attendance.
But recent research points to a potentially troubling trend: High-poverty districts, like Terrebonne Parish, were more likely to budget a greater share of their final aid package for facilities and operations, especially costly projects like new construction and building repairs. That left them less to spend on academic recovery — even though they educate the kids who've had the most academic ground to make up.
 

SPRING VALLEY, N.Y. — When the state of New York became the first in the nation to require all public schools to test their drinking water for lead in 2016, Keyry Broncano learned that water drawn from 68 different taps at her high school contained dangerously high lead levels.
Then Broncano, at the time a high school junior, discovered that the water she’d been drinking since kindergarten in the East Ramapo Central School District, about an hour north of New York City, probably contained elevated lead levels: Water from 23 taps at her elementary school was found to contain at least 15 parts per billion of lead. At her middle school, 85 taps had high lead levels.
“I was like, ‘I think I’ve been drinking poison,’” Broncano said, recalling rushing home to explain the news to her mother, a Guatemalan immigrant.
It’s an experience that has been repeated in schools across the country since 2014, when a crisis involving lead in the water in Flint, Mich., prompted some states to adopt new testing requirements for schools and day-care centers.
Whenever states, counties or school districts have decided to test the water in their schools, lead has often been discovered.
 

GRANGEVILLE — “I’m impressed with the upkeep of your district’s buildings and the proactive stance Ty [Reuter] and the maintenance crew, the board, the district as a whole has done to keep things upgraded and maintained,” Richard Bauscher told the Mountain View School District 244 board of trustees.

Bauscher is a retired Middleton superintendent and current clinical associate professor at the University of Idaho. He is a facilities planner consultant who assesses and appraises school buildings and provides numbers of what it would cost to “make them whole.”

Bauscher’s survey of the school’s buildings came as a caveat to receiving upcoming state money (see sidebar), in that districts receiving the funds must produce a 10-year plan to the State Department of Education. Bauscher had already provided 35 district reports in the state.

It seems like school starts earlier every year — many kids across Arizona are already in back-to-school mode now, at the very beginning of August. And it’s hot — much hotter than summers past, with records being broken each year.

So, how are Arizona schools keeping kids cool — on buses and in classrooms in the hottest parts of the state?

To find out, The Show spoke to Cole Young, superintendent of the Mohave Valley School District — a rural district northwest of the Valley, not far from Needles, California — which just broke Phoenix’s record for the hottest monthly temperature in a U.S. city this July.

Full conversation
COLE YOUNG: So we're kind of in the tri-city area when it comes to Needles and Laughlin, Bullhead City. And we're just 17 miles south of Bullhead City. So Death Valley is only two hours away. We've got about 400 kids. We're a K-8 school district.

LAUREN GILGER: You mentioned you're not far from Death Valley. So we should not assume that because you're a little further north than us in the state of Arizona that it is not very hot there, I'm assuming.

YOUNG: It is. Yeah, we, we get plenty of heat. When we have a day that's under 100, we think it's a very cool day, maybe time for a shawl or something.

SPRINGFIELD – Following growing concerns within the 30th District about the health impacts of poor air quality, State Senator Adriane Johnson championed a vital new law that addresses and improves air quality in elementary and secondary schools.

“This law will have a significant impact on students with asthma and allergies by ensuring schools are equipped with the best resources and practices to maintain clean air,” said Johnson (D- Buffalo Grove). “This is a critical step in reducing health disparities and providing a safer, healthier environment for students, faculty and staff.”

Johnson’s law tasks the Illinois State Board of Education, in consultation with the Illinois Department of Public Health, to compile resources to assess air quality and maintain ventilation systems in schools. ISBE will implement outreach strategies to make these resources available to elementary and secondary schools within 30 days of compilation, with updates as necessary.

BURLINGTON - School officials are pursuing a long-term facilities master plan to help prioritize the department’s properties and building needs.

School Supt. Dr. Eric Conti brought the matter forth at the School Committee’s most recent meeting, and hopes this can be a plan that can be a template for the needs of the school properties

“I do not see this as a final conversation,” remarked Conti. “I really see this as a starting conversation, and we might need to have more conversation about this.”

The charge of the plan is discuss long-term facility needs with an evolving document that would prioritize major upgrades, repairs and new buildings for years to come in the school district.

This master plan is one of several in the works in town; the school system has already worked on a master plan for its athletic fields, and the Recreation Department is working on a complete master plan for all town fields and parks. This school facilities master plan would project expected repairs on things like HVAC systems, flooring, roofs and even entire new buildings. 

In a gentrifying city and socioeconomically segregated school system like Seattle’s, closing 20 elementary schools could trigger a demographic shake-up.  

Free lunch is guaranteed for all at schools where at least 30% of families are low-income. Multilingual teachers are stationed where English learners attend. Certain schools offer cultural programs that cater to students’ heritage. As the district makes plans to redirect thousands of students to new buildings, it faces pressure to preserve certain programs for kids who need them the most. 

Seattle Public Schools says it is prioritizing making schools “well-resourced” and diverse without exacerbating existing segregation. A 2023 Seattle Times investigation found Seattle schools are more segregated now than they were in the 1980s, with some school attendance zones mirroring areas that were once redlined to keep residents of color boxed into certain areas. 

WASHINGTON, D.C.—In support of the Biden-Harris administration’s Investing in America agenda, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) today announced selections for the 2024 Renew America’s Schools Prize and Grant, a three-phase, $190 million investment to help K-12 public schools make energy upgrades that will decrease energy use and costs, improve indoor air quality, and foster healthier learning environments for students and teachers. DOE identified 21 phase-one winners who will earn a $300,000 cash prize for their work building teams and identifying facilities with compelling needs for improvements. In addition, 16 of these prize winners will advance to the next phases and enter cooperative agreements with DOE for up to $15 million in awards, with plans to invest in 320 school facilities across 25 states and directly benefitting over 123,000 students and 9,100 teachers. 

The now shuttered Bon Air elementary sits just down the street from Heather Beveridge, its towering presence a reminder of the school experience her two children could have.

Ms. Beveridge homeschools her 5 and 3-year-old boys — she said people at her church do it, too — but if the school was open, she’d probably send them there. The small Pittsburgh neighborhood has been without a community school since the elementary closed in 2008.

Elementary children in her neighborhood today attend Roosevelt PreK-5 in Carrick, about a 30 minute walk from Bon Air. But Bon Air, and Ms. Beveridge, continue to struggle with the loss of the neighborhood school.

“There are kids here, but it’s hard to see,” she said, her sons running through sprinklers on a hot July day. “If the school was open, I’m sure we’d have a lot more friends.”