Six schools in Morris County, New Jersey, are installing solar modules that are expected to generate 1.84 megawatts of energy each year and significantly reduce carbon emissions.

The Montville Township Public Schools project is funded by a 15-year solar power purchase agreement (PPA) supplied by Solar Landscape, and SolarEdge is installing the system. The installations are part of an estimated 600 solar projects that have been added to New Jersey schools as part of a program to decarbonize the state’s educational facilities.

The PPA allows the school district to install the solar arrays with no upfront investment and will let it purchase the electricity the solar project generates at a lower cost than for energy that would come straight from the grid.

The project is expected to save the Montville Township Public Schools nearly $1 million in energy costs annually over the next 15 years. It will also reduce carbon emissions by the equivalent of 1,500 tons of coal burned each year.

SolarEdge is installing the system and was chosen for the project because of its track record of similar projects at schools, which the companies say aren’t always straightforward. The roofs on older buildings can have obstructions like skylights that can restrict module placement and reduce energy production.

Only a few years ago, it was considered a fluke for temperatures in New England, the mid-Atlantic states and the Pacific northwest to reach 85 degrees Fahrenheit (85 °F) before the official start of summer. But as the 2021-2022 academic year drew to a close, thousands of students and their teachers found themselves scrambling to stay comfortable in sweltering classrooms.
Some public school districts felt the extreme heat was a danger and closed early on several steamy May and June days. The situation reflected the gross neglect of public infrastructure for the 55 million mostly Black, Asian and Latinx kids who attend the country’s approximately 130,000 K-12 programs.
“Even before [COVID-19], we knew that we had an indoor air quality crisis in schools that were built 50 or 100 years ago,” Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) told Truthout. “You can’t teach or learn in freezing cold or scorching hot buildings. This is a public health issue, an equity issue.”
 

WESTERLY — A high-ranking state education official is encouraging town officials and residents to move forward with plans to address deficiencies in the town's school buildings while the state remains able to offer special reimbursement funds.

Joseph da Silva, who serves as school construction coordinator and architectural design reviewer for the state Department of Education's School Building Authority, which administers financial reimbursements to districts that participate in the department's "necessity of construction" program, and William Trimble, the authority's finance officer, walked through the town's three elementary schools on Wednesday before reviewing the program with the School Building Subcommittee.

The presentation by da Silva and Trimble focused on the 35% base reimbursement that the town qualifies for, as well as an additional 17.5% that could be attained if the building project meets incentive thresholds. They both stressed the need to have a project that is ready to commence construction by December 2023 or else the town will risk missing out on the incentives, which are expected to expire.

CHEYENNE — For years, Wyoming’s school capital construction account was primarily funded by federal coal lease bonus revenues. 
“Those have essentially gone away,” Senior School Finance Analyst Matthew Willmarth with the Legislative Service Office told the Select Committee on School Facilities at an interim meeting in Casper this week. “There is no revenue forecast to be collected from that revenue source.” 
To help make up a portion of Wyoming’s deficit in school funding due to disappearing federal coal lease bonuses, lawmakers in 2018 eliminated an $8 million cap on state mineral royalties that could be appropriated for schools. 
Looking ahead, Laramie County School District No.1 is poised to get some money for its own construction projects. 
The state Constitution allows for one-third of all state mineral royalties to be appropriated for Wyoming schools, but lawmakers enacted an $8 million cap on that allocation in the 1990s. 
The 2021-22 biennium was the first in which a full one-third of state mineral royalties could be deposited into the school capital construction account without that cap, Willmarth said. 
“That allowance of the full one-third to be distributed for school capital construction purposes means there will be about $45 million more this year,” Willmarth said. 
 

EAST SIDE — Southeast Side community members are urging Chicago Public Schools to take action after pieces of a high school’s ceiling collapsed following fierce winds and heavy rain swept through the Chicago area last week.

George Washington High School teachers, parents and former students and members of the Southeast Environmental Task Force said Tuesday a metal beam from the building’s ceiling fell in a hallway on the school’s second floor the morning after the storm. Teachers and students were in the building, 3535 E. 114th St., when the collapse occurred and said a school security guard struck by the debris was hospitalized.

Social science teacher Donald Davis created an online petition asking CPS to a build new green, carbon-neutral high school and elementary school on the Southeast Side. It has nearly 1,700 signatures. 

As part of a district-wide push for increased sustainability, Northside Elementary/Coulee Montessori is the next school in La Crosse making the shift to solar energy.
With installation scheduled to begin later this summer, the school's roof will include a network of 292 solar panels capable of generating 20 percent of the school's energy needs. District administrators, elected officials and leaders of the project gathered Monday to celebrate meeting their funding goal and announce future projects.
Leadership and staff from Solar on La Crosse Schools (SOLS) also attended the celebration event. The organization partners with the school district to coordinate fundraising efforts and to help strategize for solar installation.
"Schools use about 43 percent as much power as all of the office buildings in the United States, said Ben Golden, a member of the SOLS leadership team. "It's a great place to start when we're thinking about clean energy."
The projected reduction in carbon emissions created by the solar panels is equal to planting around 160,000 trees and will save around 7 million pounds of coal, Golden said.
Northside Elementary relies on a geothermal heating and cooling system, meaning it requires twice as much electric energy as other similar buildings. This made it a prime candidate for solar energy use, according to Mike Freybler, the energy and transportation manager with the La Crosse School District.
 

QUINCY, Fla. (WCTV) - The Gadsden County School district is working on a $60 million project to build a new school because several buildings have been poorly maintained during the past 50 years, according to district officials.

“It will really make a difference,” said Gadsden County Schools Superintendent Elijah Key. “We’re talking about buildings now where the A/C may go out, so kids are dealing with heat.”

The new K-8 school would combine students from Stewart Street Elementary, George W. Munroe Elementary, and James A. Shanks Middle School. The new school would be built on the current grounds of Shanks Middle School, which would be torn down.

Key said, right now, the buildings are not conducive to student learning.

One parent said building a new school for students is a good start, but there needs to be an investment in the classroom as well.

APPLE CREEK – Members of the community and Southeast Local School District gathered outside of Waynedale High School Monday night to watch and participate in the first groundbreaking ceremony the district has had in almost 60 years.  
Construction of the roughly 170,000-square-foot school will not start this summer — the rest of the construction bids for the project have not yet been awarded Treasurer Mark Dickerhoof said — but foundation work such as ground leveling begins this week.  
Although the construction is not expected to be completed until the summer of 2024, school officials and community members are excited for the new building and the possibilities it opens for the district.  
Building in the works for some time  
The process of requesting building proposals began back in November 2019, Dickerhoof said, and further progress was delayed when the COVID-19 pandemic hit the following spring. The district was able to pick things up last spring, choosing the architecture firm BSHM Architects and a construction manager from CT Taylor Construction.  
 

In the wake of the deadliest school shooting in state history, the Texas Education Agency plans to check whether hundreds of thousands of external school building doors lock properly before the next school year begins.

TEA Commissioner Mike Morath told Texas senators Tuesday that the agency will review external entry points of every school in Texas, which is about 340,000 doors. It will evaluate school facilities to determine what repairs may be needed to secure campuses. There will also be a review of each district’s safety protocols and meetings held between state officials and each district’s school safety committee.

Morath’s comments came during a Texas Senate committee hearing about the shooting at Robb Elementary in Uvalde, during which a gunman killed 19 children and two teachers. At the same hearing, Department of Public Safety Director Steve McCraw said the law enforcement response to the shooting was an “abject failure” and police could have stopped the shooter three minutes after arriving. McCraw also told lawmakers the teacher who taught in the conjoined classrooms where the shooting occurred had flagged to the school administration that the door would not lock.

The city’s aging school buildings, which spew out the same volume of carbon dioxide emissions as 154,000 cars each year, will be a key battleground in efforts to reduce air pollution and boost clean energy across city, advocates say.

The more than 1,800 public and charter schools overseen by the city occupy buildings that are 70 years old on average, and many are equipped with outdated heating and cooling systems that are both inefficient and emission-producing, energy advocates claim.

“The emissions are huge. We’re spending a ton of money on energy; it’s building stock we control as a city. It’s a huge opportunity to improve school infrastructure … and create union jobs,” said Dave Hancock, executive director of Climate Jobs New York, whose group authored a May report calling on the city to adopt an aggressive clean energy plan for schools. “It just makes a lot of sense.”

City officials have ramped up their solar energy efforts in recent years, building panels on the rooftops of 110 city facilities, including 60 school buildings, that produce 16 megawatts of energy a year — enough to power 2,600 homes.

Safety and security updates and a host of repairs are desperately needed across the Coeur d'Alene School District.

The district has more than $25 million in deferred maintenance — projects and repairs that have been needed for some time.

The average age of Coeur d'Alene public school facilities is 30 years, which means students are surrounded by buildings and equipment as old as, or even older, than their parents.

That age is showing, and it's only going to get worse. If nothing is done, that $25 million in facilities work needed now will increase to $68 million by 2027.

"It just snowballs and keeps getting bigger and bigger every year," said Coeur d'Alene Superintendent Shon Hocker. "We have to get a handle on this deferred maintenance, or it's going to become a bigger issue."

Earlier this month, the district's long-range planning committee presented to the Coeur d'Alene school board a recommendation for a school plant facilities reserve fund levy to help resolve the maintenance concerns. The levy would fund deferred maintenance projects for up to 10 years. The long-range planning committee deems deferred maintenance to be one of the district's highest priorities.

A school plant facilities reserve fund levy is a property tax measure decided by a school district's registered voters.

Kansas City Public Schools may close and consolidate as many as seven to 12 schools with low enrollment, so that the district can spend more money on updating classrooms, expanding programs and ensuring all students have access to the same opportunities. Officials are evaluating how best to address inefficiencies and inequities caused by an overstock of outdated school buildings operating under capacity, as part of a long-term restructuring plan to improve offerings across the district. It will be a major overhaul of the Kansas City school system that officials say is stretched too thin. Superintendent Mark Bedell has said that students in some under-enrolled schools are missing out on having full-time music or art teachers, as well as certain services, extracurriculars or even a football team. And while some schools have modern upgrades, others are outdated, with high school science classrooms that do not have sinks to use during lab experiments, for example.

Many U.S. schools were in dire need of upgrades—burdened by leaking pipes, mold, and antiquated heating systems—long before the covid-19 pandemic drew attention to the importance of indoor ventilation in reducing the spread of infectious disease.
The average U.S. school building is 50 years old, and many schools date back more than a century.
So, one might assume school districts across the nation would welcome the opportunity created by billions of dollars in federal covid-relief money available to upgrade heating and air-conditioning systems and improve air quality and filtration in K-12 schools.
But a report released this month from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found most U.S. public schools have made no major investments in improving indoor ventilation and filtration since the start of the pandemic. Instead, the most frequently reported strategies to improve airflow and reduce covid risk were notably low-budget, such as relocating classroom activities outdoors and opening windows and doors, if considered safe.
 

WAYNE COUNTY, Miss. (WDAM) - The Wayne County School District is making improvements to school facilities this summer.

All campus buildings will receive new air units with clean air handlers for better ventilation. Additionally, the district will replace some of the old windows with new tinted windows, increasing energy efficiency and making the classrooms more pleasant. Every classroom will also receive new smart panels and new chrome books.

The stated goal of the project is to ensure each student is provided with a safe and comfortable learning environment as they continue getting their education.

The $7 million project funded through grants from Elementary & Secondary School Emergency Relief Funds (ESSER) and the American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA).

Skyrocketing construction costs mean that some school projects in the $350 million bond proposal that voters approved in 2016 may need to be delayed.
Officials with Winston-Salem/Forsyth County Schools told the school board in a workshop recently that the sale of bonds will fall about $34 million short of covering all the work on the project list.
“We have a $34 million problem if we continue with all the projects we have in the bond,” said Nick Seeba, the director of facilities and construction for the school district.
Two of the eight remaining projects are most at risk for postponement, according to Darrell Walker, the assistant superintendent of operations for the school district.
Those projects are an addition at Ward Elementary School in southwest Forsyth County and a new middle school in the Smith Farm area, in the southeast part of the county.
Combined, those two projects were estimated to cost about $38 million, but with inflation factored in, the costs for the two projects has ballooned to about $47 million, according to school district figures.
 

City Council’s unanimous vote this past week to require the School District of Philadelphia to replace all of its water fountains with lead-filtering hydration stations by 2025 is a good first step, but it’s a temporary fix, said 4th District Councilmember Curtis Jones Jr.

“Some of these school buildings are just too old. At the end of the day, we need to take a look and evaluate all of our facilities,” Jones said. “If you look at the state of physical plants in our schools, we are looking at a $5 billion problem. We have to address all of that.”

Lead contamination in drinking water is a problem across the School District of Philadelphia, according to a February 2022 report by public interest research group PennPIRG. The group reviewed testing information available on about 2,000 fountains and found that 98% of schools tested had at least one tap where lead was detected in the water and over 60% of all tested outlets had lead contamination.

Some schools’ fountains showed extremely high levels of lead contamination, such as one at the Duckrey School in North Philadelphia.

Many U.S. schools were in dire need of upgrades — burdened by leaking pipes, mold, and antiquated heating systems — long before the COVID-19 pandemic drew attention to the importance of indoor ventilation in reducing the spread of infectious disease.
The average U.S. school building is 50 years old, and many schools date back more than a century.
So, one might assume school districts across the nation would welcome the opportunity created by billions of dollars in federal COVID-relief money available to upgrade heating and air-conditioning systems and improve air quality and filtration in K-12 schools.
But a report released this month from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found most U.S. public schools have made no major investments in improving indoor ventilation and filtration since the start of the pandemic. Instead, the most frequently reported strategies to improve airflow and reduce COVID risk were notably low-budget, such as relocating classroom activities outdoors and opening windows and doors, if considered safe.
The CDC report, based on a representative sample of the nation’s public schools, found that fewer than 40% had replaced or upgraded their HVAC systems since the start of the pandemic. Even fewer were using high-efficiency particulate air, or HEPA, filters in classrooms (28%), or fans to increase the effectiveness of having windows open (37%).
 

Arizona schools are entitled to get their day in court on their claim the state has shorted them by billions of dollars.
In a ruling released Wednesday, Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Daniel Martin rejected arguments by state officials and Republican legislative leaders that he has no right to rule on the legality of the formula they use to finance new schools and repairs for existing schools.
Martin said it’s clearly within the purview of the courts to determine if the state is complying with the constitutional requirements to maintain a “general and uniform’’ school system.
The judge also rejected arguments that he cannot review the claims first filed five years ago because the state has made adjustments to its capital funding system.
“Accepting defendants’ arguments based on mootness would preclude courts from ever deciding whether Arizona’s capital finance system complies with the constitution,’’ Martin wrote.
“Because a case of this complexity always will span multiple years — and multiple legislative sessions — the Legislature can always pass some new law that nibbles around the edges of the system, and claim that the case is moot and unripe,’’ he wrote. “Not surprisingly, Arizona law does not support such a contention.’’
There was no immediate comment from legislative leaders.
The lawsuit, filed in 2017 by a coalition of public schools and education organizations, contends lawmakers have been shorting schools each year for the capital funds to which state law says they are entitled.
The cumulative loss to schools from failure of legislators to obey the funding formula is now close to $6 billion, Danny Adelman of the Center for Law in the Public Interest, one of the plaintiffs’ attorneys, said Wednesday.
The issue’s roots date back to 1994.
 

The Jeffco school district is preparing to make recommendations this fall to close multiple elementary schools, kicking off its long-term plan to downsize its number of schools.

Jeffco district leaders say 49, or 58% of district elementary schools, currently have fewer than 250 students, and/or use less than 60% building capacity. Six elementary schools, in six different areas of the district, have fewer than 200 students, and also utilize less than 60% of their building’s capacity.

“While we have a large issue in this district, there are a few schools that are really facing dire situations with how small they are going into next school year and we must confront those,” said Lisa Relou, Jeffco’s chief of strategy and communications, who is overseeing the plan’s creation.

Last year I wrote a column about the Western Placer Unified School District, noting that the district and the city of Lincoln were two distinct organizations, each with its own governing board and finances. 
Western Placer Unified School District encompasses the city landmass plus adjacent areas around Lincoln. Both agencies share space in City Hall and both use each other’s facilities – parks, playgrounds and swimming pools – under a joint-use agreement that goes back many years.
Lincoln is, once again, among the state’s fastest growing cities. We’ve just passed 50,000 residents and, as reported in earlier columns, housing starts abound in all sectors of the city. More population = more students = more school facilities.
The district currently has 15 campuses - eight elementary, two middle school, two high schools (including the newly-opened Twelve Bridges High School), one continuation high school, one independent study school and one farm campus - for a total of 7,200 students. Over the next two decades, Western Placer Unified School District estimates, there will be 17,280 new housing units added within its boundaries and that growth will add approximately 10,000 new students to the district.