CHARLESTON, W.Va. — The state School Building Authority approved the extension of more time and funding for the construction of schools across the state during its meeting Monday in Charleston.

The SBA gave the okay to supplemental funding for schools in Wood, Mercer, McDowell and Hampshire counties.

The increasing construction costs attached to inflation have been the cause for delay in building new schools and providing updates to existing ones for a little over a year now.

Making adjustments on square footage allowances for the projects was a specific detail being discussed at the meeting, as the school board’s bids for the projects were being affected by inflation costs.

“That is a lot of the reason why these schools came back to talk to us today, because, when their bids came in they were higher than they thought, they were higher than the square footage allows for these projects, and so they have to look for some help,” SBA executive director, Andy Neptune told Metro News following Monday’s meeting.

Last year, voters approved over $60 million to Wood County Schools for the construction of three new schools along with making updates and expansions on others. The SBA additionally approved its $21 million commitment on Monday to go into Wood County School’s bond for the current projects.

SOUTH BEND, Ind. -  

HPM, the consulting firm managing this process for SBCSC has created its facilities master plan and shared it with the public Monday night. 

An effort to “right-size” the South Bend Community School Corporation culminated Monday in a formal recommendation from consulting partners to the school board.  

“Just the overall community voice and number of meetings we’ve had, it’s been extensive throughout this process,” said Scott Leopold, director of planning services for the firm. 

Ultimately architecture firm Fanning Howey and consulting partner HPM recommended the closure of Clay High School.  

“If you choose to keep Clay open, it’s going to cost $16.17 million over the next 5 years,” Leopold said, “and that means there are other projects that don’t get done.” 

The news was much to the dismay of many in the crowd Monday.  

“Clay has been done a disservice for far too long. Find a better way than closing it down,” one person said in front of the school board.  

“You need a find a way to save Clay, these students have found a home here. Many 8th graders are already here, working on sports for next year. People want to go here,” said another person in attendance.  

Recommendations also include facilitating clear “feeder patterns” from primary to secondary schools in the district.  

DEKALB COUNTY, Ga. — Some local high school students used their voices to get some much-needed repairs done to their school which was built nearly 100 years ago.
Almost a year ago, they made a video of what they were dealing with at Druid Hills High School and after it went viral they got school officials to take action.
Channel 2′s Tyisha Fernandes got an exclusive tour of what the school looks like now that renovations have been done.
“They deserve to have a building they feel comfortable in everyday
Dr. Vasanne Tinsley heard students loud and clear and as soon as she was named interim superintendent of DeKalb County Schools, she put several schools on a priority list to get repairs done.
Druid Hills High got work done first.
 

NEW LONDON, Texas (KETK) – It’s known as the worst school tragedy in American history. A day in which one of East Texas’ proudest assets became its most deadly killing agent, leaving a tight-knit community with hundreds of dead to bury and several lifetimes worth of grief.

By 1932, the New London school in Rusk County was one of the richest rural school districts in the United States, a claim to fame brought on by boomtown prosperity. The steel-framed E-shaped school building was built for close to $1 million, holding up to 700 children and boasting a state-of-the-art manual training shop in its basement.

MARCH 18, 1937
March 18, 1937 was a Friday. Students were preparing for an interscholastic meet to be held the next day in Henderson. Inside the New London gymnasium, which was separate from the main school building, the local PTA was holding a meeting.

Less than 15 minutes before classes were to be dismissed for the weekend, roughly 300 lives were lost in a tragedy that would echo across the nation for decades.

An explosion ripped through the school, causing the roof to fall in and bury students and teachers in a mass of brick, steel and concrete debris. Walls collapsed, and the blast was felt up to 40 miles away. A two-ton slab of concrete was reportedly hurled 200 feet from the school.

HOUSTON - A FOX 26 investigation reveals levels of carbon dioxide considered "above air quality guidelines" at a Houston Independent School District (HISD) elementary school.
According to documents obtained by FOX 26, high levels of carbon dioxide (CO2) were recently discovered in at least two classrooms at Kelso Elementary School.
"I’ve been to 3 different doctors, one doctor told me to take FMLA and not to return to that school," said one anonymous teacher from Kelso Elementary.
The teacher wants to hide their identity out of fear of retaliation. However, the teacher says the air quality is affecting the health of staff members and students.
 

The drains inside the boys' locker room showers at Poway High School don’t drain. The clay pipes, installed when the school was built in 1961, aren’t just clogged, they’re busted beyond repair. 

Ruben Arras, the director of facilities for Poway Unified, said a true repair would mean ripping up the floor not only of the shower room but the entire wooden floor of the gymnasium as well. The projected cost is $20 million. The district says it doesn’t have the money unless it comes at the cost of cutting student programs. So for now, there’s only one solution.

“We vacuum it out daily,” Arras said. “We remove the water.”

Outside the showers are rows of broken lockers. Some are so rusted that they no longer open or close. Students just leave their backpacks out in the open.

To the untrained eye, the gymnasium itself may look normal, but a closer inspection reveals sunlight peeking through the roof. Poway High Principal Richard Nash is very familiar with what happens when it rains.

“A couple times we’ve had to cancel a game in the middle of the game because the water is coming through the roof,” Nash said.

If you could build a new, improved home on a lot for less money than it would take to renovate it, what would you do?

In most cases, you would have a new home.

That decision, when it comes to public schools, is not so easy for school districts.

Take Tara Elementary School, for instance, which found it would be cheaper to take down the old school and build a new one than to renovate all the buildings on campus.

That didn't matter to the state's Department of Education.

The School District of Manatee County spent nine months working on and submitting a Castaldi Analysis to FDOE to let it know that building a new school would be cheaper than renovating the 31-year-old elementary school.

A Castaldi Analysis allows the district to determine whether it’s more efficient to replace or remodel a school.

FDOE ruled that the district must renovate Tara Elementary. Therefore the district is working on plan now to renovate the school.

Mike Pendley, an executive planner for the school district, said the district’s standard protocol is to conduct a Castaldi Analysis on every school unless the district already has determined a renovation of the school is sufficient. 

“You have to look at, does the facility lend itself to success in the current educational program because the way we teach has changed,” Pendley said. “We’re always trying to be good stewards of the (taxpayers') money. There’s only so much to go around. We have more than 8 million square feet under our roofs, and you only have so much money. You’d have to look at the schools that need it the most.”

EAST LONGMEADOW, MA. (WGGB/WSHM) - East Longmeadow High School officials met with parents and members of the public to discuss a possible plan moving forward after years of leaky ceilings and other damages.
The school building committee is looking towards building a new high school, a move many support after weighing their options.
“You had a slide up there that said, ‘what if we do nothing,’” said one parent. “So as a community, for some horrible reason decide to do nothing, how much longer can we really kick the can down the road with this existing building?”
Dozens of East Longmeadow parents voiced their concerns on Thursday about the current shape of the high school.
Members of the school building committee walked attendees through four options moving forward, including building a new school, renovating the current building and only completely base repairs.
The meeting took place after a brief tour of the school where parents and community members saw first-hand the damage inside the high school.
During the meeting, the committee presented details on the option they feel is best, building a new school.
“The school building committee elected to proceed with the option we are calling 3C,” said a school building committee member. “We were surprised to see the add/reno was so close to the all-new option in terms of cost. A lot of that had to do with the age of the building and bringing it up to code.”
 

BELLEVUE, Wash. — Weeks of anxiety, stress, and pleading with the Bellevue School District to keep all elementary schools open-ended, with the school board voting to close Wilburton and Eastgate Elementary schools at the end of this school year. Minutes later, the board's meeting room sounded as if a fight would break out, with some parents yelling at some of the school board members.

Directors Carolyn Watson, Joyce Shui, and Sima Sarrafan, voted yes to closing those schools, while directors Christine Chew and Jane Aras abstained. Aras was very emotional during her pre-vote discussion, saying that she just felt as though they should take another year before making this decision. Even though Sarrafan was in favor of the recommendation, at one point, she said, "transparency could have been better" throughout this process. She also said she felt they fell short during the pandemic.

Ardmore Elementary School was taken off the closure list a week earlier, but the future of Eastgate and Wilburton elementary schools hung in the balance until that vote was taken.

A new group of parents just joined the fight in the last week to keep Eastgate open. Chinese immigrants, with young children in the Eastgate neighborhood, said they've been left out of communications from the district.

The city’s School Board reviewed the condition of Suffolk Public Schools’ facilities during its Thursday, March 9 meeting.  SPS Director of Facilities and Planning Terry Napier provided the facilities condition assessment, with the help of Chief Financial Officer Wendy Forsman and Jeff Harris of RRMM Architects.  “In 2021, it’s a joint project with the city, we did a facilities study to basically take a review of the actual facility conditions of all of our buildings,” Superintendent Dr. John B. Gordon III said. “The facilities study not only had recommendations for building new schools, but it also had recommendations for preventative maintenance, student enrollment projections as well as any other major projects that needed to occur over the next five to 10 years. Both the City of Suffolk and the School Board agree that this is going to be our facility bible, so to speak, moving forward.”
The presentation provided the facilities study timeline being commissioned by City Council with the School Board’s agreement in fall 2018. In 2019, a contract was awarded to RRMM Architects, which worked with Cooperative Strategies to provide SPS with a final report in April 2021.   The document covers 18 schools and is 3,628 pages with the three major components — assessment executive summary, the executive summary appendix and the school facility condition assessment on individual schools. The appendix detailed information that was presented in public meetings such as the Joint Task Force Meeting Feb 25, 2020 and the joint City Council and School Board presentation Feb 23, 2021.
 

PHILADELPHIA (KYW Newsradio) — In response to a dozen elected officials, urging the school district to produce a plan for repairing its long-neglected buildings, the Board of Education says they are committed to making sure a facilities master plan is developed, aligned with a separate strategic plan.
In the wake of the closures of Gratz High School and Building 21 over concerns relating to damaged asbestos, state and city elected officials from Philadelphia are sensing an opportunity to move the repair process along, thanks to a large state budget surplus.
“I’m angry. I’m upset,” said City Councilmember Jim Harrity — and tired of waiting for building repairs that have been needed “for decades. They owe our children the money.”
 

A large percentage of educators and administrators nationwide aren’t satisfied with the buildings where they are tasked with facilitating learning—they’re too small, outdated, toxic, unconducive to instruction, and often ill-equipped for students’ rapidly evolving and growing needs, they say.

And many district leaders say they need more qualified workers to help make urgently needed improvements.

These are among the findings from a nationally representative survey of 296 district officials, 284 principals, and 478 teachers conducted in late January and early February by the EdWeek Research Center. They build on existing evidence of widespread challenges with the physical structures that support student learning and well-being. And they come as advocates continue to call for nationwide efforts to repair existing schools, build new ones, and rethink school infrastructure for a wildly unpredictable future.

Forty-five percent of teachers, principals, and district leaders gave their buildings a “C” grade or lower in the survey, roughly equivalent to the 42 percent who assigned a “B” grade to their building or buildings.

Only 14 percent gave their building the highest marks.

CATHLAMET — It’s an unremarkable day at the Wahkiakum School District when a bathroom floods, rainwater drains from the ceilings and classrooms are cold enough that teachers pass out blankets.

From his office at the front of the high school, Superintendent Brent Freeman can hear kids from rival sports teams disparaging the building as they walk inside. His brain is an intimate catalog of the district’s various infrastructural failures and how to fix them. That is, when they finally get the money.

This 433-student district on the Columbia River hasn’t been able to pass a school bond — the main way that school districts raise money for building and repairing schools — for 22 years. And the state’s largest lifeline for school construction funding won’t spare a dime unless they can pass one.

Frustrated by the perennial failure of school bonds, this tiny district is suing the state in a move that, if successful, could change the way school building construction is funded across Washington.

When a bond fails, there are slim options for school districts in the state. While large and wealthy districts like Seattle can run several school construction measures simultaneously, an increasing number of property-poor districts cannot get their measures over the hump. Districts like Wahkiakum are left scrambling for whatever patchwork of funding they can find to prolong the life of deteriorating buildings.

“With so many of our systems, we are one rung away from total failure,” said Freeman.

GREEN BAY ― As the Green Bay School District adjusts to declining enrollment, aging buildings and a $32 million projected budget deficit, the district is looking to downsize and reduce its operational expenses.
The district hired ATSR, an architecture and building consulting firm from Minnesota, to assess the conditions of the district's 42 buildings and what it would cost to maintain them for the next three decades.
Those findings were presented in January to the School Board, and now a community task force of 26 people is working to create recommendations on how to downsize and restructure the district.
Firm suggests closing MacArthur Elementary, plus other takeaways from Green Bay schools facility plan.
The task force, in conjunction with ATSR, has developed nine plans for building closures, additions, redrawing school boundaries and repurposing existing buildings to accommodate different grade levels or programs.
The task force will make its final recommendations to the board in May, and the board will vote on final building decisions in June as part of the district's 10-year facility plan.
 

As if crumbling ceilings and rat infestations weren’t enough for San Francisco’s public schools to deal with, one middle school was recently found to have lead and arsenic in its water. These structural and maintenance issues have grown so dire that the district estimated a comprehensive fix would cost at least $1.7 billion. 

In spite of visibly aging buildings and rodents on the grounds, routine state-mandated facilities inspections rated numerous SF schools as either “exemplary” or “good” between 2019 and 2021. Peering into San Francisco Unified School District’s own data, however, reveals that the condition of dozens of schools changed dramatically in a short period, and the district-hired inspector who evaluated them did so on a truncated timeline, calling into question accuracy of the district-mandated inspection reports.

In 2022, a different building inspection survey run by Vanderweil Facility Advisors found that many of those facilities once rated “above average” on School Accountability Report Cards (SARCs) are suddenly listed as being in “poor” or “fair” condition—and not just a handful, either. At least 25 school sites received lower facilities ratings, when comparing older SARC surveys with more recent Vanderweil findings. Many schools are in low-income neighborhoods serving students of color.

Nevada is working hard to repair its underperforming K-12 education system. With the new pupil-centered funding formula championed by former Gov. Steve Sisolak and nearly $2 billion in new investment promised by current Gov. Joe Lombardo, bipartisan leadership is increasing the opportunities for Nevada’s K-12 students to succeed.
Unfortunately, the promise of a thriving K-12 education system cannot be fully realized until we remedy the troubling state of disrepair in Nevada’s classrooms and school buildings.
Within the first four days of the 2022-23 school year — when summer temperatures are still at or near their peak highs — two dozen Clark County public schools experienced entire-site air conditioning failures. Dozens more experienced partial failures.
All of that occurred less than 10 years after the Legislature granted additional bonding authority to the Clark County School District in 2015, leading to a $4.1 billion capital improvement plan that included replacements for several schools and modernization upgrades in others. Even with that infusion of money, far too many Southern Nevada children are being educated in buildings where air conditioners go out, rainwater runs in through the roof and the plumbing goes bad
 

RICHMOND — The responsibility of meeting school construction costs has shifted out of reach for some localities in Virginia. Many schools, lawmakers say, have fallen into disrepair, while others need modernization.
In recent years, some lawmakers have said supporting school capital projects is the onus of local governments. In response, some localities have successfully asked the legislature to allow them to increase their sales tax to fund school capital projects pending approval by voters in a referendum. However, legislative efforts to support other extensions of that right – including one for Prince William and for the entire state – remain in limbo. To understand why, let’s start from the beginning with Dillon’s Rule.
 

PHILIPSBURG, Mont. — On a recent day in this 19th-century mining town turned tourist hot spot, students made their way into the Granite High School lobby and past a new filtered water bottle fill station.
Water samples taken from the drinking fountain the station replaced had a lead concentration of 10 parts per billion — twice Montana’s legal limit for schools of 5 parts per billion for the toxic metal.
Thomas Gates, the principal and superintendent of the small Philipsburg School District, worries the new faucets, sinks, and filters the district installed for roughly 30 water sources are temporary fixes. The high school, built in 1912, is likely laced with aged pipes and other infrastructure, like so much of this historic town.
“If we change faucets or whatever, lead is still getting pushed in,” Gates said.
The school in Philipsburg is one of hundreds in Montana grappling with how to remove lead from their water after state officials mandated schools test for it. So far, 74 percent of schools that submitted samples found at least one faucet or drinking fountain with high lead levels. Many of those schools are still trying to trace the source of the problem and find the money for long-term fixes.
In his Feb. 7 State of the Union address, President Joe Biden said the infrastructure bill he championed in 2021 will help fund the replacement of lead pipes that serve “400,000 schools and child care centers, so every child in America can drink clean water.”
However, as of mid-February, states were still waiting to hear how much infrastructure money they’ll receive, and when. And schools are trying to figure out how to respond to toxic levels of lead now. The federal government hasn’t required schools and child care centers to test for lead, though it has awarded grants to states for voluntary testing.
 

Barnstead Elementary School fifth grade teacher Annabelle Boyle waved goodbye to her students as they put on their winter jackets in preparation to leave the classroom and head to their next class.

The jackets were necessary because when students exit Boyle’s classroom, they step directly outside into the crisp February air. That’s because Boyle’s room is one half of a modular classroom building – one of two such structures that sit adjacent to Barnstead Elementary’s main building. When students need to go from one class to another – or even when they need to use the bathroom – they must walk outside between the buildings.

School administrators placed the fifth grade in the modular classrooms because the students are old enough to walk between the buildings unsupervised but still small enough to fit in the rooms. Boyle, who maintains a cheery, positive attitude, has done her best to make her small, dark room as beautiful as possible, adding colorful curtains, wall art and decorative vines. But there’s no denying that teaching in the space is a challenge.

We see the lawns are green, the gyms shine, the halls are cleared, and the cafeterias are spotless. We see Boggus Stadium set up for graduation, and the sidewalks clean.
What we don’t see are the people who make it happen.
While it’s commonly known that the custodians and maintenance workers operate a well-oiled machine 24/7 to keep the Harlingen school district running, they are often unseen and are the unsung heroes in the community.
The machine they operate has many parts — mops and the mowers and the power washers and the tractors and the weed eaters and the blowers serve as the district’s gears and pulleys, the spark plugs, the pistons and the carburetors. And one doesn’t work, the whole machine falters.
The custodians are the most important component, as are the mechanics, welders, carpenters and electricians.
On Friday morning, Ivan Barajas and Rudy Duran joined others in taking the Valley Morning Star on a day in the life of their job, and among their first tasks was working on a tractor and shredder so the signal lights would work properly.
Oscar Fragoso just finished directing traffic so the children at Austin Elementary could cross safely, and Robert Quintanilla at Vernon Middle School moved up and down a hallway with a broom, leaving a shine in his wake while students passed. Outside on the neatly manicured lawns Adan Martinez rode a mower with a precision only a veteran could muster.