A new report released Wednesday by the Vermont Agency of Education highlights the deteriorating conditions of Vermont’s decades-old school buildings — a situation that could force lawmakers and school officials to make difficult decisions in the future. 
That report, compiled by the French inspection and certification company Bureau Veritas, does not show in-depth information about any schools; instead, it is a precursor to a more thorough assessment that has not yet begun. 
But the data “indicate an aging portfolio of key systems across the state of Vermont,” the authors of the report wrote, raising the specter of increased construction and renovation costs in the future.  
With coffers full of federal pandemic aid last year, Vermont’s legislature passed a law directing the state Agency of Education to conduct a statewide study to determine how well the state’s school buildings were holding up. 
Now, the first phase of that study is complete. 
For about the past six months, Bureau Veritas has been gathering information from surveys sent to local school officials around the state. The data represents 305 public schools and 384 school buildings from every district and supervisory union in Vermont.
Those buildings are 61 years old on average, the study found, and have gone an average of 22 years without a major renovation.  
Of those 384 buildings, 196 were known to have hazardous materials present, according to survey results, while officials suspected their presence in another 52 buildings. The report did not specify which hazardous materials officials were asked about. 
Roughly 80 buildings had “Indoor Air Quality Issues” while about 50 had “Fire / Life Safety Issues,” although it’s unclear what those issues were. 
 

St. Johns County School administrators have taken zoning for the district's next K-8 school off the table.
The reason: Bids for the construction of "School NN" came in higher than the school board was comfortable with. The board voted to reject all three bids at this time, which means the school will most likely not open as slated in 2023-24 in the Shearwater development off County Road 210.
Nicole Cubbedge, the district's director for government and planning relations, said the district was already well ahead of its usual schedule in creating an attendance zone for the new school.
"Since now it may be a 2024 opening, it's too far out to realistically consider (enrollment) numbers," Cubbedge said.
The news was met with mixed feelings by parents of the Rivertown community who spoke out at Tuesday's workshop and school board meeting against several rezoning options that eventually will be affected by the opening of "School NN."
"It does make it so much harder; there's so much up in the air now," said Rivertown parent Stacy Dellone who has two students currently attending Freedom Crossing Academy.
 

DANBURY — Stokes County Board of Education members had a lot of numbers thrown at them during the Monday night meeting, as Finance Director Lanette Moore went through the proposed budget for the 2022-2023 school year.

All budget numbers will be pending approval from the County Commissioners.

First up was the Superintendent’s Proposed Current Expense budget for 2022-2023 school year, which totals $17.09 million, an increase of $2 million, or a 14.8%, from the previous year. Moore said the largest increase in salaries and benefits, which make up 55% of the budget.

Moore also went over a 22-item Superintendent’s Recommended Capital expense budget, the Athletic Grant budget and a 25-item “wish list” of additional capital items.

“I don’t see how you keep up with all those numbers,” Board Chair Von Robertson told Moore. “It’s enough to make your head swim.”

During the discussion, Facilities Director Ricky Goins expressed worry at the age of many of the system’s school facilities.

“Chillers,” a critical item used to utilize the power of outside air and water to maintain the target temperature at a constant level, so can be used to cool or heat, have 15 to 18 year life-cycle according to manufacturers, Goins said.

“We’ve got some that are 35 years old.” It cost $350,000 to replace a chiller at West Stokes a year ago, and Goins told the Board that there are four more than could go out at any time.

Durham’s public school system will begin using a new model for assigning students to schools in the 2023-24 school year, in an attempt to increase equity. On Tuesday, the district announced the new student assignment model through the Growing Together initiative. The current student assignment system was developed in 1992, when schools within the city’s limits merged with schools in the county. A student’s base school assignment is determined by where they currently live in Durham.
The new assignment model will rezone schools into five regions: Northern, Eastern, Central, Southeast and Southwest. The regions were created based on community infrastructure like highways, median household income, the percentage of people of color and the number of school-age children in the region, according to a news release. “We acknowledge that there are clear disparities between our schools,” Melody Marshall, director of student assignment, said in a school district video explaining the changes.
 

When last summer’s devastating flood put the town of Waverly, Tenn., underwater, Richard Rye was standing on the roof of the junior high school. The junior high school where, if it had not been a Saturday morning, entire classrooms of kids would have been submerged in five feet of water as a rising swell pushed through the building, ripping heavy doors off their hinges and turning hallways into rivers, desks bobbing in the current like paper cups.
Rye, the director of schools for Humphreys County, stood on that roof for hours and watched first neighboring Waverly Elementary and then Waverly Junior High School, buildings that housed 1,100 total students on any given weekday, fill with water. All he could think was: What am I going to do?
The forecast had showed only a few inches of rain. And Waverly, a rural town with a smaller-than-average Walmart, a few fast-food chains, an AutoZone and not much else, wasn’t seen as a cosmic center of extreme weather. On the night before the flood, many people, including Rye, had sat under the Friday night lights cheering on the high school football team, the Tigers. When the Tigers won, the rain had not yet started to fall.
Then, early on the morning of Aug. 21, Rye woke to a text message from the elementary school principal alerting him that Trace Creek, which winds its way through Waverly, had started rising.
Picture where you are right now and imagine taking 30 or so long steps. That’s the distance from one corner of the school to the water’s edge. That had always worried Rye, especially since the elementary and junior high schools sat in a low-lying area. When he took over as director in July 2020, they had already flooded twice, in 2010 and 2019. Rye had started to build a raised-dirt berm around the buildings in hopes of keeping flooding at bay — the best he could do with limited resources.
By 7:45 a.m. that Saturday, Rye was in his gray Ford Explorer headed to the schools. Within an hour, Rye and a bus mechanic had loaded a truck bed full of sandbags and were beginning to place them around the perimeter of the elementary and junior high buildings. Water lapped around their ankles. A few minutes later, the water was at their knees, then at their waists. The strength of the water threatened Rye’s balance and felt, he remembers, “like a tsunami.” That’s when Rye, along with a few others who were at the campus, opened a supply closet, got a ladder and climbed to the roof.
 

Batavia school district officials have outlined the next steps of its “Building Our Future Together” master facilities plan, which may involve the replacement of four of the district’s oldest buildings, which are Alice Gustafson, J.B. Nelson, H.C. Storm and Louise White elementary schools.

According to Superintendent Lisa Hichens, a total of 90 community members attended the four engagement sessions held in February and March to present information to the community and gather feedback. The sessions touched on topics ranging from funding options to new ways facilities could be modernized.

The final engagement session was held on March 24 at Rotolo Middle School, and focused on bringing together all the information from the previous sessions, according to meeting documents.

“People really needed us to explain in great detail why it was more fiscally sound and makes more sense to rebuild some of our schools rather than renovate,” Hichens said. “So even though this plan touches all eight schools, people needed to understand why rebuilding makes more sense at four of our schools.”

According to meeting documents, Alice Gustafson was the only one of the four schools that would be more costly to replace than renovate. The total renovation cost would be $169.2 million, opposed to a total rebuilding cost of $135.3 million for all four schools.

Atlanta, GA — The beautiful brick facade of Druid Hills High School hides an ugly truth.
On the inside, students say, the school building is a neglected mess. The students produced an 8-minute video showing the public what they see when they go to class every day. Recently, the DeKalb School Board voted to remove a “modernization” of Druid Hills High School from a list of proposed school repair and renovation projects sent to the Georgia Department of Education. Students — and their parents — are asking the district to reverse that decision.
The students’ video is a highlight reel of health and safety concerns.
At one point in the video, the students filmed a flaking wall and wrote, “We don’t know what’s in these paint chips or what the mold is.”
When it rains, sewage routinely bubbles up in the picnic area where seniors eat. Poles in one of the school’s computer labs have signs warning students not to touch them or risk getting an electrical shock. There are bathroom stalls with no doors. Sinks that are not adhered to the wall. Water damage in numerous rooms. Mold, too. Emergency vehicles can’t reach the athletic field and back of the school because the driveway is too narrow.
“There appears to be water dripping past electrical boxes,” another caption says.
 

In the absence of a long-term funding plan for the Schools Development Authority, the Murphy administration is tapping the state budget and money borrowed in the COVID-19 pandemic to build new schools to ease overcrowding in New Jersey's poorest communities. 
The patchwork approach avoids adding new construction debt for taxpayers, who are already paying back more than $1 billion a year for money borrowed by the authority more than a decade ago. Gov. Phil Murphy named a leader responsible for securing a new round of multibillion-dollar borrowing for the agency four years ago, but a political patronage scandal derailed those plans.
For now, flush with cash and having no known plans for the authority's future, the state is taking its first significant step after the 2019 scandal to address longstanding problems in outdated and overcrowded schools.
The authority last week approved spending $200 million in new funding — for the first time since Murphy took office in 2018 — to build new schools in Bridgeton, Elizabeth and Garfield. The state identified those locations as having "the highest priority needs" among the SDA districts, Chief Executive Officer Manny Da Silva said.
This new stopgap funding is a small fraction of what's needed across the 31 SDA districts, which are among the poorest and most segregated in the state. The cost of high-priority projects — mostly to address overcrowding — in just half the SDA districts would be $1.97 billion, according to the Murphy administration's own "rough" estimate. 
 

Akron Public Schools would need to spend at least $113 million just to make the necessary roof, HVAC and other repairs essential for students' well-being in 10 of the district's older buildings, according to a draft of a facilities study shared with the school board. 

In comparison, the district usually only has between $1 million to $3 million annually to spend out of the general fund for such repairs in buildings that are not community learning centers. 

The 10 buildings include eight active schools, including North High and Miller South, but also one closed school building, one former school building now used for administrative offices, and Kenmore-Garfield High, which is slated to be empty of students next year after the opening of Garfield Community Learning Center. 

The U.S. Dept. of Energy (DOE) released a Request for Information (RFI) to help decide how best to spend $500 million from the recently passed federal infrastructure law for K-12 public school energy upgrades.
 
The law makes available grants for energy improvements that result in a direct reduction in school energy costs, including improvements to the air conditioning and heating, ventilation, hot water heating, and lighting systems. Funding would also support renovation and repairs that lead to an improvement in teacher and student health. 
 
Many schools are in desperate need of energy improvements, according to a DOE news release. The American Society of Civil Engineers gave the nation’s 100,000 public K-12 schools a D+ in their 2021 Report Card for America’s Infrastructure report.
 

Nearly 2 million Pennsylvania students spend hours a day in thousands of schools across the state. They breathe air that circulates through the buildings, drink water from hallway fountains, and touch surfaces in spaces from classrooms to restrooms.
Years of surveys, policy research, and media reports from around the state suggest that some of these buildings likely pose health risks to students and staff. Schools are subject to safety, sanitation, and health inspections, but these requirements are handled by a mix of local, state, and federal agencies. Those records aren’t kept in a centralized, statewide database.
This makes it difficult for a family or taxpayer to easily access comprehensive information about whether a school facility is up-to-date on maintenance and inspections, information that is readily available for the state’s hospitals, nursing homes, and even local restaurants.
“It’s fragmented because there’s no requirement for it not to be,” said David Lapp, director of policy research with the Pennsylvania education nonprofit Research for Action.
And while most information can be requested from individual schools or districts, they don’t have an obligation to make those records or reports easy to understand, he added.
“Just like with any other kinds of school records, there’s some things that have to be reported, and there’s some things they don’t have to report, or can even keep from the public.”
 

COVID-19 brought to light many worsening issues in education and school facilities, among them poor indoor air quality due to older school infrastructure. 
To begin to remedy that, Vice President Kamala Harris on Monday announced an action plan to put $500 million toward upgrading public school facilities to be more cost- and energy-efficient. The funding is through the Build Back Better Act, a bipartisan infrastructure law passed Nov. 19. 
The administration is also encouraging districts to use American Rescue Plan dollars toward improving their HVAC systems.
In mid-March, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency launched the Clean Air in Buildings Challenge as part of the Biden administration’s efforts to improve ventilation in schools and other buildings. 
A fact sheet on the EPA initiative outlines four steps:
Create an action plan by assessing indoor air quality and making plans for upgrades and improvements to related systems like heating, ventilation and air conditioning.
Bring in and circulate clean outdoor air into indoor spaces.
Enhance air filtration and cleaning via a central HVAC system and in-room air cleaning devices.
Engage local communities in an action plan to improve indoor air quality and health outcomes.
 

Fifty-eight percent of Arkansas school superintendents said in a survey a lack of state funding is the top obstacle they face in financing school facilities in their district, according to a presentation to the Joint Education Committee.
Studies are inconclusive on whether academic facilities’ conditions impact student learning, but there is evidence that they can impact student health and student perception on safety, Jasmine Ray, a legislative analyst, said at a joint meeting of the House and Senate education committees. 
A temporary advisory committee created through Act 801 in 2017 reported the total estimated capital needs for public school academic facilities in the state was more than $604 million.
Arkansas’ public schools receive most of their funding for academic facilities through the state’s Academic Facilities Partnership Program. School districts and the state share the cost of facilities construction and major renovations through the program, Ray said.
Open enrollment public school charters are not eligible for the program due to not having a taxing authority, according to Ray.
The cost for public school facilities in Arkansas has risen over the years. In 2016, the Partnership Program allocated nearly $42 million annually for facilities funding, but it is estimated that allocation will be as high as $70 million for fiscal year 2023, Ray said. Arkansas’ capital outlay expenditures per student has grown over the last several years from more than $1,000 per student in 2015 to more than $1,500 per student in 2019, she said.

MEDWAY -- The town's public school department will receive $99,094 to support energy efficiency projects through a Department of Energy Resources (DOER) Green Communities Competitive Grant, officials recently announced.
The funds will be used at Medway Middle School, McGovern Elementary School and Burke-Memorial Elementary School to install ventilation controls in the cafeteria at each school.
Currently, the exhaust and supply fans in the cafeterias run at 100% power from 6 a.m. to 2 p.m. Monday through Friday, regardless of cooking activity. The makeup air from outside must be heated or cooled to bring it back to a comfortable temperature in the cafeteria, which uses significant electricity and natural gas.
With the added controls, the schools will be able to vary the speeds and only use the exhaust and supply fans when cafeteria workers are cooking and need to ventilate the space.
The controls are projected to save approximately $7,000 annually in natural gas and electric costs, and remove 31 tons of CO2 emissions annually.
The three control systems cost $108,469 in total. The Green Communities grant will provide $99,094, Eversource Energy will provide $6,975 in utility incentives and the district will provide $2,400.
 

Columbus City Schools may get five new schools at a projected cost of $297 million in the next five years. 

The new campuses — two new high schools, one new middle school and two new elementary schools — would be the first of 19 news schools proposed in the district's facilities master plan.

"What I look forward to the most (with the master plan) is shaking things up in terms of how we've handled facilities in the past, and how we can be better, do better moving forward," Alex Trevino, the district's director of capital development, told The Dispatch.

Chicago-based Legat Architects and district officials outlined recommendations for the next segment of the master plan at a recent Neighborhood School Development Partnership (NSDP) committee meeting.

Today, Vice President Kamala Harris is announcing the Biden-Harris Action Plan for Building Better School Infrastructure to upgrade our public schools with modern, clean, energy efficient facilities and transportation—delivering health and learning benefits to children and school communities, saving school districts money, and creating good union jobs. The action plan activates the entire federal government in leveraging investments from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and American Rescue Plan to advance solutions including energy efficiency retrofits, electric school buses, and resilient design.

The science of learning and development has shown that students need school environments filled with safety, belonging, and health to learn and thrive. Yet many schools rely on outdated heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) systems that make classrooms less comfortable and may pose health risks to students and teachers exposed to contaminants or particles in the air that can trigger allergies or asthma attacks and potentially spread infectious diseases – including COVID-19. Dirty diesel buses pose additional health risks for students on board and the neighborhoods they travel through — and exhaust from idling buses can pollute the air around schools. Studies show that poor air quality inside classrooms takes a toll on student concentration and performance, and diesel exhaust exposure is linked to increased school absences. Reducing this pollution will provide better health and educational outcomes — particularly in low-income communities and communities of color that have long faced underinvestment and the burden of high pollution.

The Biden administration is offering new grant funding and other resources to help school districts plan sorely-needed investments in the nation’s dilapidated school buildings and buses—though the offerings fall well short of schools’ needs.
The announcement comes just one week after the administration’s latest federal budget proposal, which does not include a previously proposed investment of $100 billion in grants and bonds for K-12 school infrastructure. Congress last year considered a similar investment as part of a broader infrastructure spending package, but lawmakers eventually excised public schools from their priority list as well.
This week the federal government announced new funding that amounts to half of 1 percent of those proposals.
A Department of Energy grant program will funnel $500 million from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law passed by Congress last November for school districts to spend on priorities, including:
comprehensive energy efficiency audits and building retrofits,
HVAC and lighting upgrades,
clean energy installation, and
training for staff to maintain these improvements long-term.
Rural and high-poverty schools will get priority consideration from the agency.
America spends $110 billion a year on school infrastructure, but that hefty sum falls $85 billion short of the necessary benchmark to fully modernize school buildings nationwide, according to a 2021 report from a coalition of school infrastructure advocates.
Leaky roofs, moldy ceilings, flooded classrooms, suffocating heat, and overcrowded hallways are a fixture of the scenery for millions of America’s K-12 students, particularly in rural and low-income areas. Many school buildings that haven’t been renovated for decades can’t easily be upgraded because they weren’t built for modern equipment.
 

WASHINGTON, D.C. — Today, as part the new Biden-Harris Action Plan for Building Better School Infrastructure, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) released a Request for Information (RFI) for a $500 million grant program from President Biden’s Bipartisan Infrastructure Law for K-12 public school energy upgrades. The program will help deliver cleaner and healthier classrooms, libraries, cafeterias, playgrounds, and gyms where over three million teachers teach and 50 million students learn, eat, and build friendships every day. Energy upgrades to America’s public schools, including leveraging renewable power sources and electric school buses, will bring the nation closer to President Biden’s goal to build a net-zero economy by 2050. 

“Children should be able to learn and grow in environments that are not plagued with poor insulation and ventilation, leaky roofs, or poor heating and cooling,” said U.S. Secretary of Energy Jennifer M. Granholm. “President Biden fought for these funds to give schools and their communities the resources they need to improve student and teacher health and cut energy costs, allowing districts to focus more resources on student learning.” 

A Cumberland County Board of Education committee voted on Thursday to ask the county for more than $470 million to replace and renovate schools over the next five years.
The board’s auxiliary services committee unanimously approved a resolution that says the board “has determined and found that both renovations to and replacements of existing school facilities are needed to meet the needs of our current and future student population.”
The resolution will go to the full board for consideration at its meeting April 12.
Joe Desormeaux, associate superintendent of auxiliary services, told the committee that if the board approves the resolution, it will be sent to county commissioners. He said school officials have discussed the issue with county officials.
Desormeaux said he thinks county officials understand the challenges facing the school system.
“It’s unclear what they will do,” he said.
The resolution says the county has options to provide funding for the construction cost, including issuing bonds or choosing to provide some funds on a “pay as you go” basis. It calls on commissioners “to take all necessary steps, by the issuance of bonds or otherwise, to provide funds for the school system’s capital building needs.”
The anticipated $470.4 million in school construction costs assumes that the school system will get a $50 million grant to help pay for a new E.E. Smith High School. The facility is expected to cost about $95 million.
 

HOUMA, La.— “Honestly, I don’t understand why they would want to shut schools down. It’s confusing,” the second deputy-chief of the Grand Caillou/Dulac tribe said, as she sat in the RV she calls home for the time being, with her children joyfully playing around her. (The deputy chief asked her name not be used in the article because she prefers to stay out of the media.)

The Grand Caillou/Dulac Band of Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw is one among 11 state-recognized tribes, such as the Pointe-au-Chien and the United Houma Nation, that call the Louisiana Gulf Coast home. These communities have lived through years of segregation, colonization, hurricanes, land loss and educational discrimination.

Hurricane Ida, which made landfall in late August 2021, has compounded these problems in a way the tribes are still trying to come back from. Education has been adversely impacted over the past year, with many schools destroyed and some shut down — such as in the cases of Grand Caillou Elementary and Upper Little Caillou Elementary schools. The hurricane also exacerbated issues that led to the permanent closure of Pointe-Aux-Chenes Elementary School.

The Terrebonne Parish School Board voted 6-3 in April 2021 to shut down Pointe-Aux-Chenes Elementary School, due to a cited lack of enrollment, and the school was officially shut down in June.

“They just closed our school last year. They claimed that there weren’t enough students there,” said Theresa Dardar, a tribal member of the Pointe-Au-Chien.