The design for the new Simon Sanchez High School is 90% complete and a bill introduced Tuesday could help close the gap in funding needed to see the project to fruition.
Simon Sanchez High School students have been waiting nearly 10 years for the new facility, the planning and construction of which has been hit by multiple delays including procurement battles, the COVID-19 pandemic, and environmental issues. As time lapsed, the cost of construction has increased, which means the $65 million Guam Department of Education has committed for the new high school campus now falls short.
GDOE estimated the cost for the new Simon Sanchez High School would be about $138 million.
“Right now, we are in design stage. While we are working on estimates, the final decision on what will be constructed depends on how much money is available,” said Superintendent Jon Fernandez.
The design was supposed to have reached the 90% target on May 26, but Fernandez has said it was a moving target.
The unforeseen discovery of endangered snails on almost 2 acres of the property forced Taniguchi Ruth Makio Architects to make modifications to the design in order to work around the snails' habitat. The modification resulted in the loss of 16 classrooms.
“We have scaled down but not for cost issues alone. We cut back the number of classrooms to more closely align with projected amount of students at SSHS. Luckily, this reduction helped us resolve the impact of the snails by allowing us to shift the school to avoid the area,” Fernandez said.
 

Temperatures kept rising in Philadelphia and Baltimore. Finally, it was just too hot to keep students in classrooms without air conditioning. On Tuesday, both systems let students out early.
For Principal Richard M. Gordon IV, it was just another early-summer day in the halls of his West Philadelphia high school, where sweltering temperatures, high humidity and a lack of ventilation made classrooms so uncomfortable that students could barely sit still.
“Can I honestly say effective learning is happening in my building? I can’t,” said Gordon, the principal of Paul Robeson High School.
Climate change poses a growing threat to American schools. Regions where extreme heat was once rare — from the Northeast to the Pacific Northwest — now periodically find their buildings unbearably hot as spring turns to summer and again when classes resume in August or September.
In much of the South, air conditioning has long been a necessity, and schools are typically outfitted with centralized systems, although rising temperatures may require upgrades.
But in places such as Philadelphia, air conditioning was a luxury decades ago, when most school buildings were constructed. Perhaps there was a hot day in mid-June or an uncomfortable swelter in early September. They were flukes.
 

Gone are the “it’s so hot that all Philly schools are closed” days. Going forward, Philadelphia School District officials aim to close only those buildings without air-conditioning when temperatures soar.

Chief Operating Officer Reginald McNeil said in an email sent to staff Friday that the district will begin paying special attention to conditions inside the 111 buildings that lack air-conditioning in all instructional spaces. (The district has 216 schools, but about 300 buildings in total.)

“If temperatures in instructional spaces are expected to hit 90℉ or higher, we then determine if a temporary shift to virtual learning or other action is necessary,” McNeil wrote. “Our goal going forward is to make that decision only for the schools that do not have sufficient air-conditioning systems to keep temperatures below 90℉ ... and to make the decision as early as possible, preferably the day before, to minimize last-minute disruption for our students, families and staff.”

The district has a stock of aging buildings, many of which don’t have adequate electrical systems to support central air-conditioning or window units in every room.

McNeil said the district has begun “working with urgency over the past five years” to upgrade electrical systems and add air-conditioning.

Even as Republican state leaders stressed “hardening” schools and increasing security measures as a response to the state’s deadliest shooting last week in Uvalde, educators stressed the community aspect to their campuses.
They are gathering places where families celebrate their students’ awards each quarter, watch children pack the auditorium at choir concerts and fill the hallways for meet-the-teacher nights.
Voters trickle into gymnasiums on Election Day to cast their ballots, and families in need can bring home meals from school-based food pantries.
“We live in a free and open society, and we want to value and cherish that,” said Ferris superintendent James Hartman. “I don’t think anyone in public education wants to create a ‘Fort Knox’ of schools. It’s just not realistic, and just doesn’t fit in what we want American society to be.”
Similar security-focused rhetoric arose after the deadly Santa Fe High School shooting in 2018 but the state still provides little money for such improvements. Local taxpayers shoulder the bulk of the financial burden through bonds, which the state has made more challenging to pass in recent years.
But school superintendents say costs and logistics — such as aging campuses, the sprawling footprint of buildings and sheer number of students flowing through — make hardening a challenging solution to implement.
 

The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) has allocated a total of $150 million — of which it is obligating nearly $35 million in a first phase — to modify the structures of some 55 public schools to make them more earthquake-resistant and meet updated building codes.

The “seismic retrofit” — defined as “the modification of existing structures to make them more resistant to seismic activity, ground motion, or soil failure due to earthquakes” — seeks to improve those structures that were not damaged by the 2019 and 2020 earthquakes.

FEMA confirmed that the initial obligation has been allocated to the Puerto Rico Public Buildings Administration through its Hazard Mitigation Grants Program (HMGP).

Specifically, the HMGP project proposes to evaluate, design, and reinforce those buildings to reduce the risks to future seismic events and mitigate loss of life and damage to critical infrastructure.

The funds for the first phase of the project will be used to evaluate and determine if the properties are historic, if they are in a flood zone, among other considerations.

Work will also be done to develop designs, specifications, and the corresponding estimate for each facility to carry out the refurbishment work. During the second stage, funds will be allocated to cover the costs of auctions, permits and construction.

The total estimate for the two phases of the project hovers at around $150 million, the federal agency noted.

The rickety outdoor stairs leading to the second floor of Hilo Intermediate School are loosely blocked off by yellow caution tape. Wood chipped off the building’s exterior earlier this year, threatening nearby students.
Problems at the nearly century-old Big Island school are on a long list of statewide repair projects that are part of a growing backlog as the Department of Education’s facilities maintenance team struggles to keep aging buildings safely in operation.
Aaron Kubo, a social studies teacher at the school, also said tile pieces have fallen from the ceiling indoors in past years.
“With these repairs, if they’re not addressed somebody is going to get hurt,” Kubo said. “Safety should be on the forefront of our minds and taking care of those who are our future should be a priority.”
The DOE’s facilities maintenance branch is responsible for 4,425 buildings statewide, which is more than 20 million square feet of space, according to the department’s figures. It’s kept busy as some 20% of Hawaii’s 257 public schools are more than 100 years old and the average age of school buildings in the islands is 72.
The department has long been criticized for its hefty repair and maintenance backlogs, and data shows not much has changed.
A backlog of more than 4,600 repair projects with an estimated cost of $1.4 billion is a sharp increase from 3,800 backlogged projects in 2018.
 

Inflated building costs are causing school construction projects across West Virginia to go back to the drawing board.

In April of last year, seven West Virginia counties (Mercer, Jefferson, Roane, Greenbrier, Mineral, Ohio and Summers) divided up $75 million in state funding to either replace, renovate or relocate outdated school buildings.

But with rising construction costs, the state School Building Authority (SBA) estimates a 25 percent increase to fund those projects, maybe more.

SBA Director of Special Projects Sue Chapman said the authority is working to refinance bonds and get an additional $29.5 million to supplement project costs.

She said each school district will also have to pare down on their original construction plans.

If voters approve Measure C, the Sierra Sands Unified School District’s approximately $52.1-million bond measure June 7, the district plans to bring solar power to its schools.

“The district, in its facilities master plan, has been studying the possibility of implementing solar at our school sites to offset our costs,” said Superintendent Dr. Dave Ostash.

He said the district spends approximately $1 million out its general fund for electricity.

“The idea is that it makes sense where we live in a space that has more sunshine than just about anywhere in the country that we ought to harness some of the solar energy we have here to offset our costs and make a long-term investment in ultimately saving the district money and more importantly reinvesting that money in facilities,” Ostash said. “The concept is to utilize the resources the best we can to purchase and implement solar on as many of our campuses as possible.”

He said the district plans to start at Burroughs High School and Murray Middle School, which he said are the district’s biggest users and eventually have solar power at all its schools.

WASHINGTON — It wasn’t only hot outdoors in D.C. Tuesday. Many classrooms in the District were balmy as well.
Numerous DC Public Schools (DCPS) teachers and parents hopped on social media to ask District leaders to fix broken heating, ventilation and air conditioning (HVAC) units in their classrooms.
Maya Baum has taught in DCPS for five years. She said her classroom got up to 80 degrees before she and her 22 students were transferred to a smaller, cooler room elsewhere on campus.
“There's no airflow and we're hot and uncomfortable,” she said. “You don't want to do anything when you feel like that.”
The District Department of General Services (DGS) maintains DCPS school buildings.
Baum said the administration and custodial staff routinely reach out to DGS to get HVAC units fixed, but problems persist. She said she cannot understand why this happens every year.
"When we came to our school building after having been out of it for over a year due to a global pandemic, we were told by city leaders that our buildings were ready and had had walkthroughs, and work orders had been completed, and they were ready for students and staff to return,” she said. “We had classrooms with no AC and it was 90 degrees outside. And when it was wintertime, and temperatures were dropping below freezing, we had no heat.”
 

Schools that are net zero energy ready are coming to Miami-Dade as local firm Zyscovich Architects has designed two middle schools in the county that would use technologies to lower energy consumption and costs.

Zero energy schools are “extremely energy-efficient buildings that produce as much energy as it uses over the course of a year,” a document from the US Department of Energy details. Net zero energy ready schools are designed and built so that on-site renewable energy can be installed later on with minimal disruption.

These buildings can cost 5% to 13% more than conventional schools, but in the long term savings could help cover other operational costs of equal importance. For instance, by annually saving on energy, school officials could redirect those operating costs to fund teacher salaries, a priority for state and local authorities.

“Many US school districts struggle for funding and improving a school building’s energy efficiency can free up operational funds that may then be available for educational and other purposes,” says the department’s document.

The YS Schools Facilities Committee held its second meeting on Thursday, May 5, and reported on information-gathering work that had been meted out to its members at its first meeting in April.
In the month between meetings, the committee’s contingent of building users, headed by board liaison Dorothée Bouquet, collected results from a questionnaire on facilities conditions that was disseminated amongst district staff. At the same time, the committee’s building experts, led by board liaison Judith Hempfling, assessed several areas of building systems.
Bouquet, who worked with committee members and educators Kineta Sanford and Brian Mayer, reported that an overwhelming majority of district staff — nearly 100% — participated in filling out the questionnaire.
“I’m just giving an overview here, but I want the users to know that I’ve read all of [the questionnaires] and that they’re being shared with the whole group,” Bouquet said.
Among the issues identified by building users, the largest concerns discussed at the meeting were heating, ventilation and air conditioning, or HVAC, systems and air quality; bathrooms; and safety and security.
According to users, the heating and cooling at Mills Lawn, McKinney Middle and YS High schools are unreliable, with students often wearing coats indoors in winter and feeling too warm in spring and summer. The HVAC system, many said, is often loud enough to be disruptive or make it difficult to hear important announcements. Some teachers bring in other heating and cooling devices at their own expense.
 

As enrollment has increased in Cape Henlopen School District, so has a call for equity in the funding of major school construction and renovation projects to house the growing numbers of students.

Since Beacon and Mariner middle schools opened in 2003, district enrollment has grown by more than 2,000 students, with the biggest increases occurring in the last 10 years, according to data provided by Assistant Superintendent Jenny Nauman. 

In 2011, the student population was 4,845. As of Sept. 30, 2021, 6,078 students were enrolled, and as of May 19 enrollment increased to 6,265 students.

Along with this growth has come a burgeoning need for new schools. The Cape district has churned out a school a year for six years for a total construction cost of $212 million, according to data provided by Cape Director of Capital Projects Brian Bassett.

Love Creek Elementary opened in 2017 and cost $30 million; H.O. Brittingham Elementary opened in 2018 and cost $32 million, including demolition costs; and Rehoboth Elementary opened in 2019 and cost $33 million.

ANCHORAGE, Alaska (KTUU) - The recent school shooting in Texas has some Anchorage parents wondering how secure their child’s elementary school is. The news that the shooter was able to access the school through an unlocked door has some wondering how easily that could happen in Anchorage.

Anchorage School District Maintenance and Operations Director Rob Holland explained that every elementary school in Anchorage is locked and secure during school hours. In other words, the doors are open during drop-off and pick-up times for parents, but once classes start, the doors are locked.

But some schools have an extra layer of security, which Holland called incredibly important for stopping an intruder. Schools that have a security vestibule require visitors to be buzzed in twice, the second time through a door that leads directly into the school office.

“If we can slow down a potential intruder we create response time,” Holland said. “If we can completely lock out an intruder then we are able to prevent whatever nefarious act would have occurred.”

Already a national leader in energy conservation, Indianapolis Public Schools (IPS) is moving forward with planning for a solar energy project that would significantly reduce costs, cut carbon emissions and boost sustainability efforts in the state’s largest city.

The IPS Board of School Commissioners approved an agreement with Carmel-based Sun FundED to develop, finance and operate solar energy systems for the district under the firm’s “Solar-as-a-Service” program. The project would reduce energy costs by an estimated $45 million over the next 30 years.

“Research has consistently shown that solar projects can reduce air pollution and CO2 emissions, and significantly reduce energy costs,” said Dr. Aleesia Johnson, IPS superintendent. “Under this new partnership, IPS will install solar panels at multiple schools and locations across the district, enabling our schools to utilize clean energy while at the same time reducing the district’s carbon footprint.”

If approved and installed as planned, the project would represent the largest solar energy project by an educational institution in Indiana history. The project proposes both roof and land based solar installations at 20 schools, and also includes the ability for the district to adopt renewable energy and sustainability programs for the classroom through SAMI, a digital platform intended to help students understand the financial and technical aspects of solar energy.

Project locations, size and system output will be finalized through the development phase of the project.

Four years after an armed 17-year-old opened fire inside a Texas high school, killing 10, Gov. Greg Abbott tried to tell another shell-shocked community that lost 19 children and two teachers to a teen gunman about his wins in what is now an ongoing effort against mass shootings.
“We consider what we did in 2019 to be one of the most profound legislative sessions not just in Texas but in any state to address school shootings,” Abbott said inside a Uvalde auditorium Wednesday as he sat flanked by state and local officials. “But to be clear, we understand our work is not done, our work must continue.”
Throughout the 60-minute news conference, he and other Republican leaders said a 2019 law allowed districts to “harden” schools from external threats after a deadly shooting inside an art classroom at Santa Fe High School near Houston the year before. After the Uvalde gunman was reportedly able to enter Robb Elementary School through a back door this week, their calls to secure buildings resurfaced yet again.
But a deeper dive into the 2019 law revealed many of its “hardening” elements have fallen short.
Schools didn’t receive enough state money to make the types of physical improvements lawmakers are touting publicly. Few school employees signed up to bring guns to work. And many school districts either don’t have an active shooting plan or produced insufficient ones.
 

The Camas School Board this week approved a six-year capital facilities plan that includes an estimated $210 million worth of school facilities projects the district could need to serve a growing student population over the next six years.

“We’re not obligated to do any of these,” the school district’s director of business services, Jasen McEathron, told school board members on Monday, May 23. “We are talking about likely options we’ll need to address if we’re to deal with capacity issues.”

Camas School District voters passed a $120 million capital facilities bond in 2016 that helped build the district’s newest schools — Lacamas Lake Elementary and Discovery High — and increased building capacity across the elementary, middle and high school levels.

Now, McEathron said, two of the district’s three middle schools — Odyssey and Liberty — are starting to experience “some capacity constraints.”

“At Odyssey, the program is popping, and they’ve been very creative to accommodate students interested in being in that middle school program,” McEathron said. “There is some opportunity to potentially accommodate more students … but we could have two of three middle schools with capacity issues within the next six years.”

Though the district could get away with remodeling and adding portables to accommodate student growth over the next few years, McEathron said Camas “may have to entertain (building) another middle school” if housing development in the area “really takes off” between 2022 and 2028.

The district also may have some capacity issues at Camas’ largest elementary school, Woodburn Elementary, in the next few years, McEathron said.

“A new study from Trust for Public Land effectively dispels a common misconception among school administrators about the price tag of transforming asphalt-covered and treeless schoolyards into green schoolyards,” according to a press release from TPL. “The study compared the typical cost of building and maintaining a traditional ‘gray’ or asphalt-covered schoolyard in California to a ‘green’ schoolyard (replacing asphalt with more natural green space and infrastructure) over a 20-year period. While gray schoolyards had a moderately lower initial renovation cost ($2.3 million compared to $2.6 million for green schoolyards), they yielded no benefits over time, with schools continuing to sink money into resealing asphalt.” By contrast, green schoolyards bring close to $600,000 in net benefits. These include higher student attendance and staff retention, better academic performance, and savings on energy costs.

CHULA VISTA (KUSI) – Parents and students of Castle Park High School in Chula Vista say the school has been neglected for years.
KUSI’s Sports department has covered this exact issue for many years, but no changes or improvements were made to the school’s facilities.
Now, parents and students have had enough.
They’re calling on the Sweetwater Union High School District to take action, and renovate the deteriorated facilities.
KUSI’s Teresa Sardina obtained photos of the current conditions of various Castle Park facilities, and spoke with concerned residents about their efforts to get the school much needed renovation.
The Sweetwater Union School District provided KUSI’s Teresa Sardina with the following statement regarding the school’s rough condiditon:
Following up, Wednesday on Good Morning San Diego, KUSI’s Jason Austell got reaction from students, parents and Chula Vista mayoral candidate Ammar Campa-Najjar.
Adrian Gomez, a sophomore at Castle Park, and his father, Pedro Gomez, told KUSI’s Jason Austell that the issue has become so bad that it has become an equity issue.
Adrian added he and his classmates are happy to get the attention they deserve, and are prideful to attend Castle Park High School.
 

SALT LAKE CITY – Brightly colored student artwork adorns the walls behind a brand-new addition to an elementary school in the Granite School District.

“We have had situations where angry parents try to come on to the campus and get frustrated at the door situation,” said communications director Ben Horsley.

The door situation he’s referring to is a more than $1 million renovation project that created a secure, single entry point vestibule. The update is meant to give officials control over who is entering the building and represents a significant change to the school’s original layout.

“You used to actually have to walk into the building and walk into the front office over here,” Horsley said, pointing down a hallway past the new secure entry point. “And then they would immediately have access to the rest of the building, and that’s not acceptable in the current climate and circumstance.”

Long Beach Unified parents, students, and community members gathered at Browning High School to provide suggestions for the district’s Facilities Master Plan at a community forum yesterday.

Through interactive and collaborative activities, around 40 attendees shared their thoughts as a group on what school buildings need to look like and provide to ensure an equitable and adequate education for all student populations. Some common suggestions included more green spaces, transitioning off of fossil fuels, and access to healthier cafeteria food. 

As per LBUSD’s website, the Facilities Master Plan is a “long-term blueprint” that outlines the constantly changing needs of facilities in the district. The plan looks both at how facilities are designed and how they are used and intends to properly align facilities with the district’s overall educational mission.

The update process typically takes over two years, incorporating a needs assessment for every school, community input, and equity analysis. The district is working with the architectural firm Cannon Design to run assessments, gather community feedback and draft the plan that will be submitted to the school board this summer.