GREENSBORO, N.C. (WGHP) – A group called the Joint Capital/Facilities Committee for Guilford County – members of the Board of Commissioners and the Board of Education – heard during an educational summit on Tuesday that cost overruns will require about $170 million more dollars in capital to complete eight rebuild/replace projects school officials have planned.
Voters in 2020 approved $300 million in bonds for the first phase of repairing, rebuilding and replacing every facility for Guilford County Schools, and in May they added the remaining $1.7 billion to complete the list.
For the projects scheduled to be completed in 2024, officials said they were not able to lock in prices and that they continue to rise. Steel prices, as an example, have increased by 128% since the bonds were passed.
Commissioners asked school officials to take a look at their design plans and find ways to save money.
 

LOUISVILLE, Ky. (WDRB) -- Thousands of students in eastern Kentucky are still waiting to head back to school as their communities continue to pick up the pieces.

The area, hit by devastating flooding last week that left at least 37 people dead, is home to 18 school districts. Four of them returned to the classroom this week, but 14 others are still cleaning up and assessing damage.

Breathitt County Schools delayed the first day until Aug. 29, while Perry County Schools are scheduled to start on the same day. Floyd County Schools are scheduled to begin classes on Aug. 24. But, as of Monday, the school districts in Letcher and Knott Counties had not yet scheduled a new start date. 

The state's department of education said damage varies school-by-school. But, the ones hit hardest are brainstorming how to get kids back to class.

The first day of school in Fayette County Wednesday was also the first day that the new $84. 5 million-plus Tates Creek High School building opened. The building for 1,800 students replaces the old high school built in 1965 by the same name on Centre Parkway. “The students deserve a building like this,” Assistant Principal Kevin Crosby said, pointing to tree-filled views from floor to ceiling windows in the cafeteria.
Students and staff helped design the building, which is built around a learning academy model that gets kids career, college or military service ready. “The learning environment which you go to every day makes a huge difference in your experience,” not just in what students learn but in how they interact with others, said principal Marty Mills.
“It’s breathtaking,” Mills said.
“Opening a brand-new building is a once in a lifetime event,” Mills told families in a recent letter. Senior Adam Lynch said he hopes the new building will bring memories as his class will become the first to graduate from it. He said it was “the best school” to go to.
 

Nine years ago, severe flooding in Eastern Kentucky’s Floyd County buried McDowell Elementary School in a layer of mud, temporarily displacing about 300 students. Flooding had hit the school at least three other times since 1989, which isn’t surprising. It sat next to Frasure Creek in a FEMA-designated flood hazard zone. Although insurance helped the school district pay for cleanup, because of its soggy history, the cost of flood insurance on that property soared to more than $100,000 a year. “I was in there shoveling out mud myself,” recalled Henry Webb, who was superintendent of Floyd County schools at the time. “It was not a great situation. We want schools for our kids that are safe and secure.”
Recognizing that the floods would only continue, if not worsen, the Floyd County Board of Education voted to close McDowell Elementary in 2017 and move its students as part of a countywide consolidation plan. Now, following the catastrophic July 28 flooding that devastated much of Eastern Kentucky, other school districts in the region might need to weigh similar decisions.
Gov. Andy Beshear last week estimated the expense of rebuilding, repairing and refurnishing the region’s flooded schools at more than $100 million. “Think about, when we build a new school, what that costs,” Beshear told reporters at a news conference. “That’s significant work.”
 

ANCHORAGE, Alaska (KTUU) - There are a lot of things that need to get done leading up to kids going back to school, but what a lot of people may not realize is on the last day of school in the spring, kids head out and maintenance workers go in.

“It gets fast — right now is the time we’re really pushing the pedal to the metal to get these projects done,” said Calvin Mundt, project manager for Capital Planning and Construction for the Anchorage School District.

Mundt’s team has been working on a retubing project where two of the school’s four boilers are getting an upgrade. Mundt said it’s part of a larger project that started three summers ago when the last small chunk of funding from a 2017 bond allowed them to retube the boilers — a cost of $60,000 each — instead of having to replace them outright.

“If we were to replace each of those boilers, we would do so with a modern high-efficiency boiler — that would involve engineering and replacing all of the controls also, that’s about a million dollars a copy,” said the district’s acting Chief Operating Officer Rob Holland.

As students in Hawaii return to the classroom this month, the state’s department of education has reported about 10% of the 12,000 school classrooms in the state have poor quality air ventilation.
The department said those 1,261 classrooms have limited access to natural outdoor airflow because of central air conditioning. Among these rooms, officials identified 73 across seven schools with high levels of carbon dioxide, meaning there is a greater probability of breathing in another person’s exhaled air. 
Parents received letters from the seven schools, the department said. The state’s Office of Facilities and Operations will follow up to improve the air quality to “the extent possible.” 
The department said it has already put in place several steps to improve air quality and help prevent the spread of COVID-19 in schools statewide, including placing 12,000 20-inch box fans in every classroom before the 2021-22 school year to improve outside air ventilation. 
Ventilation can help prevent airborne viruses, such as COVID-19 from spreading. Schools are also beginning to relax other COVID-19 mitigation strategies, such as indoor mask requirements. 
 

RICHMOND, Va. (WSET) — Governor Glenn Youngkin participated in the official grand opening and ribbon cutting of the Mecklenburg County Middle School and High School on August 7, a best-in-class school made possible by the community.
Youngkin signs legislation investing in school facilities across the Commonwealth.
Youngkin ceremonially signed HB 563 sponsored by Deputy Majority Leader Israel O'Quinn, R-Washington, and SB 473 and SB 471 sponsored by Senator Jennifer McClellan, D-Richmond.
HB 563 and SB 473, the School Construction Fund and Program will support $400 million in grants distributed based on student enrollment and local needs.
It will also support $450 million in competitive grants for high-need school's new construction, expansion, and modernization projects in partnership with local school boards.
SB 471 will provide $400 million in school construction loans and make additional improvements to the administration of the Literary Fund Construction Loan Program.

Conversations about “hardening” schools resurface after every mass school shooting. And so do questions about how the shooters manage to get into classrooms.
There have been 27 school shootings in 2022 that resulted in injuries or deaths, according to the Education Week school shooting tracker, and 119 since 2018, when Education Week began tracking such incidents.
To prevent school shootings from happening, some security experts and educators suggest adding more physical security measures, such as surveillance cameras, metal detectors, bulletproof glass, and door-locking systems, as well as adding more law enforcement and armed staff in schools.
On the surface, it would seem like locking classroom doors would be one of the simplest and easiest ways to secure classrooms. But about 1 in 4 public schools in the United States lack classroom doors that can be locked from the inside, according to the most recent data from the National Center on Education Statistics from the 2019-20 school year.
Robb Elementary School, in Uvalde, Texas, where a shooter killed 21 people in May, had problems with locks on both interior classroom doors and entrances and exits to the school building, according to a report from a special committee of the Texas legislature. The building had a classroom door system that required teachers to lock their doors from the outside using a key to secure their classrooms when they weren’t in them. Teachers often propped the doors open or instructed substitute teachers to do so if they did not have keys for the locks, which were limited and no longer in production.
 

As eastern Kentucky grapples with the aftermath of historic flash flooding, key infrastructure like schools, transportation, power and water systems will take a long time to rebuild.

Some schools are acting as emergency shelters in the wake of the disaster and many districts have already announced delayed starts to the school year. In a news conference, Gov. Andy Beshear said the cost of rebuilding and repairing school systems in the region will be massive.

“When looking at schools, there’s two things: there’s damage assessments and when school is going to start. But school damages are in the tens of millions, probably over  $100 million.”

Beshear said just the school cleanup costs in Knott County, one of the areas hardest hit by flooding, was estimated at over $1 million. 

“We’ve been talking to legislative leaders and we’re all committed to providing funding for our school system and working on a package like the SAFE Act in western Kentucky,” Beshear said.

Solar panels atop a pair of Wanaque schools are now powering the grid as part of the school district's effort to save some green, district officials announced this week.

The 390-kilowatt solar array split among the K-8 district's Wanaque and Haskell elementary schools will produce enough energy each year to offset 72% of the district's energy use or approximately 63 homes, according to the district's project partners, Connecticut-based Greenskies Clean Focus and local outfit Pfister Energy.

The companies will sell the electricity generated to the district at a reduced rate under a 15-year contract, district records show. First-year savings are estimated at $51,000.

A TALE OF TWO SCHOOLS
You might call it the tale of two schools. Because under one roof-- and a leaky one at that-- the Jackson Mann School was permanently shut down on June 27—its students and staff dispersed, its supplies transported across the city. But, there is another school in the same failing building. The Horace Mann School for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing will remain in the same structure for at least another year.

The Jackson Mann Horace Mann complex has the highest buildings needs score in the entire school system. That’s BPS-speak for the building in the worst shape that impacts the most students. Eventually, the building will be torn down. The plan is to build a new one at that location. But the Horace Mann school population is filled with students who are some of the most vulnerable, who require the most services. They need a very specialized learning environment. And the Boston Public Schools has nowhere else to put these learners until a swing space is retrofitted - hopefully in fall 2023.

The decision to keep the building open for one school while closing it for the other has left people confused and outraged.

“Good planning, of which we’ve not had a lot in the Boston schools for a while, should have been able to figure out an alternative," Larry DiCara, a former Boston city councilor and author of a memoir on busing and the Boston Public Schools said.

Meanwhile, it is the families who pay the price.

More than 1,000 Ohio schools in 81 of 88 counties will share $47 million in the state’s push to promote school safety, part of a response to a shooting at a Texas elementary school in May.
Republican Gov. Mike DeWine said Tuesday grants of up to $50,000 will be used to cover expenses for security cameras, public address systems, automatic door locks, visitor badging systems, and exterior lighting. 
"With the start of the new school year quickly approaching, we want students, staff, and parents to know that we care about school safety, and we're working every day to make sure that rural, urban and suburban schools alike have the safety and security resources they need," DeWine said.
A week after the shooting in Uvalde, Texas, DeWine outlined new proposals he said would make schools safer. That proposal was expected to include a request to the General Assembly to pay for each school building in the state – public and private – to meet the best practices for physical school safety. The state already committed $5 million this year for K-12 safety measures.
The 1,183 schools receiving money from Tuesday’s announcement had applied for money but did not receive any of the $5 million given in May.
 

DENHAM SPRINGS, La. (WAFB) - A new school in Livingston Parish will soon open six years after the flood of 2016.

The new campus, which is located on the former Southside Junior High site, incorporates the students of the previous Southside Elementary and Southside Junior High.

Both previous campuses were severely damaged during the flood. Officials say water reached as high as six feet above ground in some areas. FEMA even declared the buildings could not be restored due to the extent of the damage.

To avoid any potential future flood damage, the new school buildings are constructed more than nine feet higher than the previous complex.

“This facility truly is a showcase structure,” Livingston Parish School Superintendent Joe Murphy said of the new campus. “The design and layout are the result of much research and collaborative input to ensure that every aspect of the campus enhances learning.”

GARDNER - Pandemic-related supply chain challenges have put the new Gardner Elementary School construction project so behind schedule, school officials are delaying the start of school.

Brenda Sheehan, who takes care of her eight-year-old grandson, was taken by surprise. "Two weeks, it's a lot, and then what's going to happen at the end of the school year?" Sheehan wondered.

The two-week delay at the elementary school trickles down and forces a one-week delay at the middle and high schools, and it's complicated. Administrators have to juggle athletic schedules, bussing, and MCAS.

"There's also the teachers' contracts, which are 184 days. So you have teachers in the same bargaining unit starting at different times, ending at different times," said Mark Hawke Gardner Public School's Director of Finances and Operations.

That's why Gardner's school superintendent is asking the Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education for a special waiver, to excuse Gardner Elementary from having to stay open longer at the end of the year.

Modern school buildings support student achievement. But Washington’s reliance on local voter-approved funding for public school building projects has left some students relegated to buildings that are outdated, cramped and potentially unsafe.

State Superintendent of Public Instruction Chris Reykdal wants to change that. He intends to ask state lawmakers to revamp the state’s Common School Construction Account, earmarking those public-land revenues for cash-strapped rural schools.

More details are forthcoming, but on its face it’s a good idea. It could bring the state closer to resolving the systemic funding inequities between districts with different tax bases.

The funds, from timber sales and other revenues generated on Common School trust lands, are now used to augment locally funded school remodeling and construction projects. But historically, growing urban and suburban school districts have tapped a disproportionate amount of that money, even though the rural communities where the revenues are generated have a harder time raising local funds.

About 90 percent of public school construction and renovation is funded through local bonds and levies, Reykdal said. Revenues from public lands are a dwindling supplement to those local dollars. They accounted for just 1.38 percent of the total state and local funds for K-12 schools’ capital expenditures in fiscal year 2021, down from more than 3.3 percent a decade ago, according to Office of the Superintendent of Public Instruction data.

Mike Pickens joined the National Council on School Facilities (NCSF) as executive director in 2021 after nearly 20 years at the West Virginia Department of Education, leading in facilities and transportation. NCSF is a nonprofit organization that represents state public school facilities officials, advocating for public school buildings that are physically sound, sustainable, and conducive to learning. The organization encourages federal investments and assistance to build state capacity and support high-need districts, a mission directly related to improving education, health, and the school environment, Pickens said. He spoke to ASBJ intern Bella Czajkowski about failing building systems and related issues, and how the council strives to foster healthy learning environments.

(This interview was edited for length and clarity. A video of the interview follows below.)

In addition to funding, what are some other facilities challenges across the country?

The age and neglect of major building systems are taking a toll. In 2020, the U.S. Government Accountability Office found that 41 percent of districts required HVAC systems upgrades or replacements in at least half of their schools. Twenty to 35 percent of all school districts had serious deficiencies in at least half of their roofing, lighting, or safety and security systems. COVID-19 has recently elevated the condition of public-school facilities into the national consciousness. School buildings with poor ventilation and air quality present special risks in the face of a highly contagious airborne virus. Poor indoor air quality has been a barrier to restoring full confidence in returning to in-person schooling. Strategic facilities planning and management could reduce the annual need for capital investment. But this progress against our growing deficit will not happen without systemic policy changes.

Yellow spray paint encircles large, jagged potholes in the Lake City High School parking lot.

"Once you start to get cracks, they just get worse and worse and worse," Coeur d'Alene School District Director of Operations Jeff Voeller said.

At Fernan STEM Academy, windowsills are warped, hand washing sinks are disintegrating and cooling towers are falling into disrepair.

"There are definitely some health and safety issues here," district spokesman Scott Maben said.

Crumbling sidewalks, rotting ramps, torn carpets, dilapidated heating systems, and entrances and schoolyards that need increased security are among the many items the district hopes to address with funding from the school plant facilities levy that will go before voters Aug. 30.

If this levy passes muster at the polls, it would allow the district to collect up to $8 million per year for 10 years. If the full amount is not needed in any given year, less than $8 million will be levied.

The district has 40 buildings across 17 school campuses and four operational facilities. These facilities are, on average, 30 years old.

The backlog of deferred maintenance in these facilities exceeds $25 million. Without a dedicated and sufficient funding source, the deferred maintenance cost will snowball, hitting a projected $68 million within five years and exceeding $101 million within 10 years.

Rising temperatures due to climate change are causing more than just uncomfortably hot days across the United States. These high temperatures are placing serious stress on critical infrastructure such as water supplies, airports, roads and bridges.

One category of critical infrastructure being severely affected is the nation’s K-12 schools.

Ideally, the nation’s more than 90,000 public K-12 schools, which serve over 50 million students, should protect children from the sometimes dangerous elements of the outdoors such as severe storms or extreme temperatures.

But since so many of America’s schools are old and dilapidated, it’s the school buildings themselves that need protection – or at least to be updated for the 21st century.

Twenty-eight percent of the nation’s public schools were built from 1950 through 1969, federal data shows, while just 10% were built in 1985 or later.

As a researcher who studies the impact of climate change, I have measured its effects on infrastructure and health for over a decade. During that time, I’ve seen little attention focused on the effects of climate change on public schools.

Since 2019, climate scientist Sverre LeRoy, at the Center for Climate Integrity, and I have worked to determine if the nation’s schools are prepared for the heat waves on the approaching horizon.

A sweeping new proposal to tackle climate change that’s gaining momentum on Capitol Hill includes funding opportunities for schools to operate electric buses and improve air quality in buildings.
But the K-12 items are short on details so far, and represent only a tiny fraction of the proposed $369 billion spending package.
Senate Democrats say the legislation would help curb the devastating effects of climate change, reduce inflation, and raise taxes on corporations. The lawmakers announced the proposal with little prior warning after negotiating for more than a year over how to tackle the party’s many priorities, from child care and paid leave to health care and immigration.
But K-12 items that were part of those negotiations at times, like upgrading school facilities and establishing universal pre-K, didn’t make it to the proposed legislation. The bill, the “Inflation Reduction Act,” could be revised further and is not guaranteed to pass both houses.
Tucked away more than 600 pages into the 725-page bill are brief nods to K-12 schools. The total amount of grant funding from which K-12 schools could benefit represents one-tenth of 1 percent of the overall proposed spending.
 

JEAN LAFITTE, La. — Getting her 7-year-old son to school used to be easy, but for Talia Matherne, it’s been a headache for almost a year now.
“My little boy has always gone to school here,” Matherne said. “It’s frustrating. These kids want to be back in their school. All these kids do.”
Her son won’t enter second grade this year at his Jean Lafitte school, Leo Kerner Elementary. Damage from Hurricane Ida still has it closed. Fisher Middle-High School next door is also close for the same reason.
That means, just like last year after the storm, all those students will again go to either Harry S. Truman School or John Ehret High School in Marrero.
“It interrupts every child’s education. They have a longer bus ride, takes longer to get home in the afternoons,” Matherne said. “They don’t get home until 4 or 4:15 sometimes.”
What use to be a five-minute trip to and from school, can now take up to 30 minutes. As a working parent, Matherne says late buses add to the frustration.
“There’s times I’ve had to leave my child with my neighbor to get to work on time,” Matherne said.