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.

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.
 

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.
 

There has been a substantial drop in the number of young children living in cities, portending even more punishing enrollment losses in urban schools across the country. That’s the jarring message of a new analysis examining population trends since the pandemic hit. 

Cities across the country have already lost enrollment in their public schools, and this decline may well continue and even hasten in coming years. That might mean that urban districts face financial pressure to lay off teachers and close schools.

“The population data suggests that the shoe has yet to drop for K-12 school districts,” wrote researchers with the Economic Innovation Group, a bipartisan economic policy organization. “Today’s smaller crop of children under five will translate to lower K-12 enrollment in years to come.”

Using recent U.S. Census data, researchers Adam Ozimek and Connor O’Brien show that large urban counties were already seeing fewer young children before the pandemic hit — and then it got worse. Between the middle of 2020 and 2021, large urban areas experienced a 3.7% decline in children under 5 and a 1.1% dip in children between 5 and 17. 

The Parker School Board has approved a bid from United Technologies to replace the chiller system at LePera Elementary School, contingent on the project receiving full funding from the Arizona School Facilities Board.
At the board’s July 13 meeting, Assistant Superintendent Paul Olson said the bid was $5,062,486.
Olson said that, while the chiller unit itself was replaced a few years ago, the system’s pipes are wearing out.
“It’s a massive project,” he said. “They expect it may run into Spring 2024.”
While most of the schools in the Parker Unified School District have air conditioners for individual classrooms, LePera has a chiller system for the entire school. The major difference is that chillers are used for much larger facilities than air conditioners.
Olson said that, when LePera was built in the early 1970s, chillers were seen as the way to go.
Engineers had inspected the system in 2017 and had concluded it needed to be replaced, given its age. However, the School Facilities Board only agreed to replace the chiller unit itself. At the time, the estimated cost of replacing the entire system was $1.4 million.
Olson said a variety of factors, including inflation, have driven the price up.
 

OCEANSIDE — Between two federal grants, one approved and the other pending, the Oceanside Unified School District anticipates receiving approximately $80 million to help modernize two Camp Pendleton elementary schools within the next two years.
North Terrace and Stuart Mesa elementary schools are located on the North County military base, making them eligible to participate in the Department of Defense (DOD) Public Schools on Military Installations (PSMI) grant. The grant pays for 80% of each school’s modernization efforts while the selected school district matches the remaining 20%.
At the July 19 board meeting, Andrea Norman, associate superintendent of business services, said the DoD recently selected North Terrace to receive funds. Stuart Mesa expects the PSMI grant sometime in the next two years.
 

On July 26, the U.S. Department of Education (ED) recognized 27 schools, five school districts, and four postsecondary institutions, as well as one state education agency official, at a Washington, D.C. ceremony for their efforts to cultivate sustainable, healthy facilities, wellness practices, and hands-on, outdoor, environmental learning. 

By highlighting schools’, districts’, and postsecondary institutions’ cost-saving, health promoting, and performance-enhancing sustainability and environmental education practices, ED-GRS celebrates these schools and brings more attention to their work. The ceremony was a reminder of the many new initiatives afoot at ED, as a result of decades of nationwide advocacy and growing awareness surrounding the green schools movement.

The Biden Administration has taken significant steps on environmental sustainability, climate, environmental health, and infrastructure, and new programs have been implemented related to sustainable schools at other federal agencies. While ED is not authorized dedicated environmental education or school infrastructure programs, we have worked to think creatively about school sustainability, infrastructure, health, and environmental education. In the past year ED has:

As clean energy jobs soar across the state, Wisconsin schools are helping their students break into the industry while cutting energy use in school buildings.

A new resolution, which heads to the Milwaukee School Board for a vote Thursday, would push the district to cut greenhouse gas emissions 45 percent by 2030 by investing in clean energy projects and making school buildings more energy efficient.

School Board President Bob Peterson, school board directors and community leaders spoke at a press conference Tuesday, saying the resolution would help the environment and assist students in finding careers in clean energy.

If adopted, the district would use the projects to teach students about the industry, and dedicate staff and resources toward climate justice education.

Citizen Action of Wisconsin Executive Director Rober Kraig spoke at the event in support of the resolution.

He said Milwaukee schools have been "starved for resources" and unable to update their buildings to be energy efficient, "so a huge conversion of this kind would have a big climate impact."

"Climate change may be scary, and it is at some level," Kraig said. "But it's also a huge opportunity to rebuild and reinvent an economy that lifts all."

DENVER — School board members with Jefferson County Public Schools will study a plan to close more school buildings Tuesday night, as the district continues to downsize because of a lack of enrollment.
It seems like a jarring proposal for a metro area that in all accounts seems to be growing, but Colorado’s population growth is decreasing and has been since 2015. Colorado's state demographer, Elizabeth Garner, said it is due in large part to a lack of births in the state.
“For Colorado as a whole, we reached our peak school age population in 2018 and we’ve been declining ever since,” Garner said.
In the 2020 census, Colorado added 38,529 school-aged people, under the age of 18. But 43 of Colorado’s 64 counties saw their 18-and-under population decrease since 2010. One of the largest decreases in that population was in Jefferson County, a fact that Garner attributes to more people in that county aging in place and their school-aged kids eventually aging out of public schools.
 

Joseph Rodman West Elementary, near Washington, D.C.’s Petworth neighborhood, appears not only modernized but resurrected. And the firm behind the new and improved structure is behind several other public buildings in the District of Columbia.

Perkins Eastman has renovated at least 14 D.C. Public Schools (DCPS) buildings since the district dedicated $4 billion in 2007 to making its facilities healthier, more energy efficient, and sound. This one, which the firm completed before the school year in August 2021, aspires to be the world’s first net-zero-energy, LEED Platinum, and WELL-certified public school. But before its doors opened, it needed a new moniker.

In July 2021, Mayor Muriel Bowser approved legislation to rename the building John Lewis Elementary School. Joseph Rodman West was a U.S. senator, a Union general, and a chief executive of the District of Columbia. But in a statement, Bowser said he was much more than that. 

With the start of the new school year just weeks away, families are preparing to send their kids back to school, stocking up on school supplies and new clothes. As families get ready, so do school district maintenance teams across North Texas.
Teams have spent all summer updating air conditioning units, making needed repairs and doing preventive maintenance — changing filters, cleaning coils, replacing belts and motors — to make sure air conditioning systems are running properly so classrooms are cool on the first day of school.
“We work around the clock making sure that everything is ready to go,” said William Kelly Horn, assistant superintendent of facility services with Arlington ISD.
Even with extreme temperatures this summer, many North Texas districts have stuck with normal protocols to prepare air conditioning units for the approaching school year. The bigger concern has been making sure crews working in the heat are safe.
Triple-digit highs are expected to continue in the area for much of this week. Last month, the high reached at least 100 degrees on nine days, compared to the typical June total of two. A heat advisory is in effect for portions of North Texas until Wednesday at 9 p.m. Hot temperatures and high humidity will increase the risk for heat-related illnesses to occur, especially for those working outside.
 

ROCHESTER, Minn.-The Rochester Public School Board approved the district's 10 year long term facilities maintenance plan at its meeting on Tuesday. 
RPS' Director of Finance and Technology John Carlson said there is an estimated $295 million dollars worth of projects for the next 10 years at 36 district buildings, which have an average age of 41 years old. 
However, Carlson said record high inflation and supply chain issues have increased the estimated cost of future projects and that the district may have to cut back its funding amount on some projects in the future. 
RPS is required to submit a 10 year plan to the Minnesota Department of Education but Carlson said the district only needed to approve its plan to spend around $5 million dollars for the 2024 fiscal year. 
"What you are really being asked to approve is the FY 24 pay as you go amount because that is the amount we need to turn in on these sheets and it will be on the pay '23 levy that you are going to have access to in Sep. and even at that time you have further chance to say, no we do not want to levy that amount but we can not get a number on the levy sheet until we approve the long term maintenance plan by July 31," Carlson said. 
 

COEUR D'ALENE, Idaho — For decades, steadily growing student populations have driven an ongoing need for Kootenai County school districts to acquire land, build schools and hire more teachers for new classrooms.
However, a drastically changing economy is exacerbating those challenges for local school districts.
Kootenai County has seen some of the highest population growth of any county in the U.S. over the past decade. This population growth coupled with a low supply of affordable housing has led area realty prices to soar, reports our partners from the Coeur d'Alene Press.
For home sellers and investors, rising real estate prices are cause for celebration, but for renters, businesses and school districts needing space to build new facilities, high realty prices pose a real problem.
“No one‘s just giving away land,” said Scott Maben, director of communications for the Coeur d’Alene school district.
Acquiring land has become far more cost-intensive for the school district, but building new schools isn’t optional.
“This year we've seen more growth in the secondary schools,” said Jeff Voeller, the Coeur d’Alene district’s director of operations. "That's why a new middle school is so critical for us because we will continue to see them busting at the seams."
According to Voeller, it would cost millions of dollars to buy enough land for a single school in the current market.
 

SUGAR LAND, Texas — Fort Bend ISD board members are considering approving more than $7 million for the remediation and renovation of an elementary school where inspectors first found mold in May.
The hundreds of kids zoned to Barrington Place Elementary School will have to go to other campuses this upcoming school year while the mold is removed.
The school district said the mold is not airborne and was found in the insulation above the ceiling.
Although the school district said it doesn't pose an immediate health hazard, it will cost millions of dollars to remediate the school.
In late May, the school district said mild mold growth was found on some of the school's walls. A disinfectant was used to clean the areas. But then in June, the school district said more mold was found above the ceiling during a routine inspection. Insulation surrounding the chilled water piping deteriorated with age and allowed moisture to get into the material, the district said.
 

After Texas’ deadliest school shooting happened in his district’s own backyard, Southwest Independent School District Superintendent Lloyd Verstuyft knows it is incumbent upon him and his staff to ensure every facility in the district on the outskirts of San Antonio is as secure as possible.
That involves upgrading security technology, assessing each of Southwest ISD’s 18 campuses, fixing any physical safety defects and providing emergency operations training to all staff members.
But all of that comes at a cost.
While the Uvalde school shooting hasn’t necessarily taught San Antonio school districts anything new about school safety, district officials say it has heightened their sense of urgency to solidify their security plans and highlighted the need for far more funding to secure campuses.
Since the May 24 shooting, which killed 19 children and two teachers, Gov. Greg Abbott has directed state agencies to ensure schools are more secure and charged state Education Commissioner Mike Morath with outlining several actions school districts must complete before the start of the 2022-23 school year. Those actions include conducting safety audits of all school facilities, inspecting every exterior door, convening each district’s safety and security committee to review plans for emergencies like school shootings and training all staff, including substitutes, on safety procedures for their campus and district.
 

(The Center Square) – The current period of inflation, with rates that have not been seen for more than 40 years, is not just impacting the price of gas, food or other staples.
According to a Kentucky Department of Education official, a dozen or perhaps more public school district construction projects statewide are also bearing the brunt of the sudden rise in costs.
Chay Ritter, the director of the KDE’s Division of District Support, told the Capital Planning Advisory Board on Wednesday in Frankfort that construction costs for new school projects have almost doubled from their initial estimates. In some cases, that’s happened in less than a year.
For example, he said Christian County Schools estimated the cost to consolidate its two high schools would be $107 million last November. It rose by $10 million in February and $30 million in May.
Last week, the Kentucky New Era reported two bids for the new school to replace both Christian County and Hopkinsville high schools were $203.4 million and $198.9 million.
 

Urban communities are “disproportionately” receiving K-12 Common School Trust Dollars, despite the trust’s revenue coming from timber harvesting in rural areas, and State Superintendent Chris Reykdal said his office wants to change that. The Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction and Reykdal held a press conference Tuesday — the first of nine OSPI has planned leading up to the legislative session in January — to outline their priorities for “transforming” public K-12 schools in the state. “We are a state that has to share in our interests,” Reykdal said. “Our kids deserve equitable opportunities to learn no matter where they are.”
The major challenge raised by OSPI is that the revenue being generated in rural Washington is “almost exclusively” ending up in counties such as King, Pierce, Spokane and even Yakima. Reykdal said that the Department of Natural Resources is responsible for managing a trust for public schools, which is primarily funded through timber harvesting. Agricultural lands and leases also fund that trust, but 50-60% of the money is generated from trees. Reykdal said that money, in turn, goes to the legislature, which decides how to appropriately fund the school system.
The Washington legislature puts that money towards the School Construction Assistance Program, OSPI’s largest capital budget program, which the state uses to match funding when voters pass local school district bonds. But to pass a local bond for school funding, 60% of voters in school districts must approve the bond issue and the accompanying taxes to support it. Even if smaller, less affluent communities can pass a bond, they might be “property poor” so the amount they are matched by the legislature isn’t always significant enough to transform schools, he said. Due to the declining revenue from the harvesting of timber, Reykdal said OSPI wants to “stop depending” on those funds for the School Construction Assistance Program.
 

Food deserts. Poor housing conditions. Lack of community investment.

These challenges may not always come to mind when people think about how to improve America’s public schools.

But when my colleagues and I studied the 21st Century School Buildings Program, a US$1.1 billion school building and renovation initiative in Baltimore, these were the kinds of issues that staff from community-based organizations, schools, philanthropic organizations and city agencies hoped to address through improved school facilities.

Schools are the “hubs and hearts” of neighborhoods, as one community member told us during our research in the Southeast, Southwest and Cherry Hill sections of Baltimore. If, as one community school coordinator shared, schools want to achieve their goals to educate students, they should strengthen the communities that surround them.