PEA RIDGE — The floor of the gym at Pea Ridge Junior High has been renovated to spotlight volleyball.
“They should be really proud of it,” Keith Martin, superintendent, said. “We’ve raised the lights — I guess the ball was hitting some of them.”
“You can still play basketball in there,” he said.
“The white is volleyball and the light gray lines are the basketball lines,” Martin said. “That’s what we said we were going to do. This is what our kids deserve. The primary focus of this court is volleyball.”
“We also made the locker rooms for the girls better,” he said.
“One thing we’re trying to do, we’re trying to make sure that everything we do pays homage to that PR symbol,” Martin said, referencing the “PR” in the railing of the new gym. “That logo stands the test of time. The bird head changes. And so, even when we resurface the football field, it will have the PR in there somewhere.”
“We will always try to pay respect to the PR because our older community in town loves that,” Martin said.
Work is progressing across all the district’s facilities.
Carpeted floors in buildings have been pulled out and luxury vinyl tile installed.
“We’ve started putting new HVAC units in the Junior High as” he said. “We’re putting new roof on Intermediate campus.”
 

JEFFERSON — With additional revenue coming in during the last school year and a reduction in some costs the district would have faced in a normal year, the Jefferson school board Monday was able to set aside a substantial sum for future maintenance/capital project costs.
The board voted to transfer $950,000 from the 2020-21 year-end balance into Fund 46, a special fund established in 2018.
The district had until July 30 to take any leftover balance from the 2020-21 school year and move it into the Fund 46 long-term capital maintenance fund.
When the fund was established in 2018, the district had to follow some strict parameters. First, the district had to develop a 10-year maintenance plan. Secondly, the district was not allowed to touch any money set aside in this special fund for five years.
Thus, the first year that Fund 46 money will be available will be 2023, at which point the entire fund will be available to address targeted maintenance concerns.
Prior to Monday night’s decision, the School District of Jefferson had a $1.1 million balance in Fund 46.
Any money designated toward this fund goes into the state aid formula for the next year, being treated as if the district spent it. That provides a budgetary advantage down the line.
The district did not make a transfer into Fund 46 after the 2019-20 fiscal year. The current balance in Fund 46 is $1,169,570.16.
This includes a $700,000 deposit in 2017-18, a $400,000 deposit in 2018-19 and investment income of $69,570.16, said Laura Peachey, director of business services for the Jefferson schools.
 

When school facilities closed for in-person learning in early March 2020, the assumption was that the shutdown and pandemic would be temporary blips in the memory of our students. Some 16 months later, school facilities are finally preparing to re-open for in-person learning. We could go about business as usual, but after the devastation of the pandemic, and the increasingly widespread climate-change-linked weather disasters, it’s obvious we should not. Emerging from the crisis of COVID-19 gives us an opportunity to rethink our public schools, to simultaneously the structural inequalities that pervade the system, and prepare it for the climate emergency ahead.
Lawmakers have had difficulty grappling with the layering of immediate and longer-lasting crises. That’s where we think the Green New Deal for Public Schools, introduced to Congress by Representative Jamaal Bowman (NY) on July 16, comes in. Building on the research of our climate + community project, its basic premise is that we have to tackle our society’s gravest problems not one by one, but in their entirety, through ambitious physical and social investments that lift up the workers and communities that have suffered the most disinvestment throughout American history. We want to fight systemic racism, poverty, and environmental breakdown with comprehensive, holistic policies.
The legislation authorizes $1.4 trillion in spending over the next decade to upgrade and decarbonize every public school in the U.S. with new solar panels, batteries, and green retrofits, while also investing in adequate staffing levels for every vulnerable school in the country. By greening schools, we can create centers of climate resilience infrastructure in every community and help to address the legacy of educational inequity that creates an uneven landscape of public schools.
 

After a year of prolonged school closures due to the Covid-19 pandemic, California’s educators have been hard at work readying to open to full-time, in-person learning across the state.
Schools face falling enrollment and learning loss that will impact schoolchildren for years to come, making successful reopening essential to regain lost ground.
While Gov. Gavin Newsom expects 99% of schools to reopen to full-time in-person learning in August, schools may be derailed by an entirely different calamity threatening children’s access to a stable education: worsening wildfires due to climate change.
Wildfire smoke threatens children’s health. Breathing toxic pollution from wildfires is roughly 10 times more dangerous for children when measured against comparable air pollution from other sources.
The fine, inhalable particles found in wildfire smoke, called PM2.5, can cause increased emergency room visits for asthma and increased upper respiratory infections in children.
Long-term studies on wildfire smoke in children is currently lacking, but we know from data on firefighters that repeated exposure results in higher lung cancer rates and greater risk of death from heart attacks and stroke.
Before the pandemic, schoolchildren in California had started to miss an increasing number of school days due to wildfires. Schools close for evacuation or because they lack the protocols and infrastructure to keep indoor air quality safe during poor air quality days.
The state has increased infrastructure investments in schools due to the Covid-19 pandemic that could be beneficial for schools’ wildfires readiness as well, but substantially more funding and support will be needed to help schools navigate the worsening threats of climate change.
Learning loss and lost school days are a growing problem in California, with counties like Sonoma seeing upwards of 40 cumulative days lost. Since the state began collecting data in 2003, wildfires have accounted for two-thirds of school closures through 2018.
 

Chicago Public Schools officials defended their recommendation on Wednesday to keep Aramark’s custodial services, acknowledging the cleaning company’s history of problems with filthy schools but giving assurances that new ways of tracking cleaning complaints in-house will yield better results than in the past.

As children prepare to return to class amid a surge of the coronavirus’ Delta variant, top facilities officer Clarence Carson promised the Board of Education at its meeting Wednesday that safeguards he’s put into place will hold the cleaning giant more accountable than it was in the past.

“There have been a lot of challenges throughout that tenure, one way or another,” said Carson.

“I do understand all the concerns that are there from prior services, but I know that we have improved those services over the last several years and plan on continuing to improve those moving forward.”

Carson was on the CPS team which a year ago had promised to dump Aramark and SodexoMAGIC as facilities managers.

But late last week the Sun-Times reported that the district was planning to award a new contract to Aramark. School board members Wednesday voted unanimously 7-0 to authorize a $369 million deal that leaves the Philadelphia-based Aramark in charge of cleaning 600-plus school buildings for the next three years, starting Oct. 1 under a new facilities management system that brings all maintenance, cleaning and complaint management, plus tracking, back under CPS control. CPS has already paid the company more than $500 million since 2014 when it privatized the management of cleaning and other building facility services.

Nearly half of Maine’s K-12 schools do not have sprinkler systems, and more may have old, incomplete or otherwise compromised fire suppression systems, according to Maine Department of Education estimates.

In a survey of Maine superintendents on the status of their facilities, 56 percent reported their schools had sprinklers, DOE Communications Director Kelli Deveaux said. But neither the DOE nor the fire marshal’s office has an exact list of which of the state’s 715 schools have fire suppression systems, which have outdated systems and which are unprotected.

School fires are most likely to happen during the day and during the school year, when buildings are at peak occupancy, the National Fire Prevention Agency found. But with the prohibitive cost of fire suppression and no broad mandate to fix all educational buildings with such systems, Maine’s aging schools remain vulnerable.

Highly-anticipated safety upgrades to protect Edison Elementary School are well underway this summer. And though students and staff might not see them when they arrive back in the classroom this fall, new wood and steel reinforcements will better protect the 103-year-old building from earthquakes while keeping occupants safe.

The Centralia school, which serves around 360 students, will be the first building in the state to receive structural upgrades under the state-funded School Seismic Safety Retrofit Program.

The program allocated $13 million in 2019 and $40 million in the 2021-2023 biennium through the state Legislature and Washington Office of the Superintendent of Public Instruction (OSPI). State departments leading the charge, including OSPI and the Department of Natural Resources, say the program is the first of its kind and is a critical step in repairing the oldest and most vulnerable schools in Washington.

The upgrades are expected to last the lifetime of the building.

Alongside district staff and project architects, The Chronicle got the chance to tour the building and see the work done so far. The retrofit is largely focusing on two areas: installing steel beams vertically within the gymnasium to reinforce the roof and act as a failsafe for the unreinforced masonry, and installing wooden beams within the exterior-facing walls where the foundation of the building lies.

Families, staff and students likely won’t be able to notice the changes when they return for class.

With 28 years in school nutrition behind her, 12 as director of food services in Plymouth-Canton Community School, near Detroit, Kristen Hennessey has meal planning down to a science. She can usually look at a menu, estimate the cost and count on having all the ingredients and supplies ready for preparation.
But now, with chicken and beef prices up, a worldwide shortage of packaging materials and a dearth of long-haul truckers, she’s not as sure what she’ll be serving the district’s 18,000 students this fall. And she won’t be surprised if distributors start adding transportation surcharges “to stop the bleeding on their end” — something she hasn’t seen since the Great Recession.
“It’s a domino effect,” she said. “We’re at the point now where we don’t even know what’s going to come in the back door.”
Food services are just one aspect of school operations affected by inflation, which is experiencing a 13-year high. Wages are climbing because districts can’t find enough employees to drive buses or provide students additional academic support. Price hikes on materials are causing some districts to hit pause on construction projects and districts are paying higher wages for teachers to help students catch up.
At a time when the American Rescue Plan is flooding school districts with more federal money than they’ve ever had, educators are slowly awakening to the reality that those funds might not go as far as expected and that inflation may have a lasting impact on their regular budgets as well .
“School districts are like little cities. You’ve got food service. You’ve got transportation. You’ve got maintenance. Inflation across the sectors will impact all those areas,” said Charles Carpenter, chief financial officer for the Denver Public Schools.
 

With 28 years in school nutrition behind her, 12 as director of food services in Plymouth-Canton Community School, near Detroit, Kristen Hennessey has meal planning down to a science. She can usually look at a menu, estimate the cost and count on having all the ingredients and supplies ready for preparation.
But now, with chicken and beef prices up, a worldwide shortage of packaging materials and a dearth of long-haul truckers, she’s not as sure what she’ll be serving the district’s 18,000 students this fall. And she won’t be surprised if distributors start adding transportation surcharges “to stop the bleeding on their end” — something she hasn’t seen since the Great Recession.
“It’s a domino effect,” she said. “We’re at the point now where we don’t even know what’s going to come in the back door.”
Food services are just one aspect of school operations affected by inflation, which is experiencing a 13-year high. Wages are climbing because districts can’t find enough employees to drive buses or provide students additional academic support. Price hikes on materials are causing some districts to hit pause on construction projects and districts are paying higher wages for teachers to help students catch up.
At a time when the American Rescue Plan is flooding school districts with more federal money than they’ve ever had, educators are slowly awakening to the reality that those funds might not go as far as expected and that inflation may have a lasting impact on their regular budgets as well .
“School districts are like little cities. You’ve got food service. You’ve got transportation. You’ve got maintenance. Inflation across the sectors will impact all those areas,” said Charles Carpenter, chief financial officer for the Denver Public Schools.
The economic indicators are clear. This summer, the Consumer Price Index — which measures changes in what people typically pay for goods and services — saw its largest one-month and 12-month increases since 2008, according to the government’s Bureau of Labor Statistics.
 

In an auspicious moment, school district officials, teachers and employees gathered outside a two-story building for a ribbon-cutting ceremony to mark completion of the new Terwilliger Elementary School. 
Terwilliger Elementary was previously located at Northwest 62nd Street, but closed its doors at the end of last school year. The new school is at 3999 SW 122nd St.
Discussions about closing the school began among school board members in December. The closing will save $11.6 million in renovations, and was meant to allow the district to complete a comprehensive rezoning starting in 2022.
However, due to not having a strategic plan set up and wanting input from the community, the rezoning is postponed.
Many teachers and parents at the old Terwilliger opposed the idea, threatening to pursue legal action or send their children to private schools. 
Speakers at the event included Terwilliger's new principal Jesaly Alvarez, Board chair Leanetta McNealy, Superintendent Carlee Simon and President of Parrish McCall Constructors Inc., Mike Walsh. 
 

Gov. Ralph Northam wants to allocate $250 million in federal relief funding for HVAC improvements in K-12 schools but education advocates and actual school system administrators want more equity in how the money is doled out and more flexibility in using it. 

The investment in ventilation systems, a recurrent focus amid the COVID-19 pandemic, didn’t come as a surprise, said Chad Stewart, manager of education policy and development for The Commonwealth Institute for Fiscal Analysis. But he and many advocates, including other members of the Fund Our Schools coalition, say they were taken aback by the structure of the proposal, which must be approved by the General Assembly in a special session next month. 

“What’s unique, at least based on the details we’ve seen so far, is the complete lack of equity,” Stewart said. Many of the state’s school funding programs are based on a division’s local composite index — a measure of its ability to afford education costs. But under Northam’s proposal, localities would be required to use their own rescue funding required to match the state’s contribution, which would be calculated based on student attendance counts, for a total of $500 million. 

In practice, the program would advantage large districts like Fairfax County while largely ignoring small, high-poverty districts without the same ability to pay, said Rachael Deane, director of the Legal Aid Justice Center’s JustChildren program. But for many local administrators, there’s an even more fundamental problem. 

Since the start of the pandemic, Virginia schools have received more than $2.8 billion in federal aid earmarked specifically for public education. Divisions were given the flexibility to use that money for HVAC improvements, and many already have. In Richmond City, for example, there have been 47 completed upgrades since March of 2020, according to data from the state’s Commission on School Construction and Modernization. In Brunswick County, there have been 61, with another 189 still in process.

CHESTERFIELD COUNTY, Va. (WWBT) - Ettrick Elementary School’s new building is opening this Fall, and community leaders gathered Monday for a ribbon-cutting ceremony to celebrate.

Ettrick Elementary’s new building, which is located on the same property as the old school, was finished under the $33.76 million budget and on time. It will open on Aug. 23.

“This is a guaranteed ‘Wow!’” said Dr. Merv Daugherty, superintendent of Chesterfield County Public Schools. “Working together, we have accomplished something great for our children and community. Let’s never forget that our schools are community buildings.”

The new building has 95,990 square feet and the capacity to hold 750 students.

LINCOLN COUNTY, W.Va. (WCHS) — Duval Elementary and Middle School in Lincoln County is closed until further notice as the county looks at issues with the building.
Summer school was canceled Friday at the K-8 school after a recommendation from CAS Structural Engineering, which said the building is not safe. CAS was not available Friday for comment.
"We received a letter yesterday, a recommendation that the parts of the main building additionally be closed," Lincoln County Schools Assistant Superintendent Joshua Brumfield said. "So we're working through that process now."
School and state officials, including the state fire marshal’s office, came Friday to look at the damage, but would not go into detail about the concerns.
Built in the 1950s, it's not the first time the school building’s structural integrity has been a concern. The west wing was shut down last October after cracks were found in the walls.
A contingency plan was made in March, should the school close, superintendent Jeff Kelley said. In the meantime, summer school students are out of the building.
"We have one week of summer school left," Brumfield said. "We're currently working on some plans and procedures to address that issue."
School officials said they've already had to make adjustments at Duval this past year, including closing the cafeteria -- which is in the west wing -- and feeding kids in the gym.
"As of yesterday, every report that we had received from our engineering firms that did the assessments all identified it as a safe place, with the exception of the west wing, which we shut down in October," Brumfield said.
 

Declining enrollment and aging buildings are forcing a Wisconsin school district to make some difficult decisions over the next few years.

La Crosse, Wisconsin, a city of about 52,000 residents located in the western part of the state on the Mississippi River, has seen school district enrollment go down by about 1,400 students over the last 20 years. It’s a trend that’s expected to continue, according to TV station WKBT. 

Because the district consists of aging buildings — the station says that five of the buildings are more than 80 years old — officials are considering merging some schools and reducing the number of buildings needed to accommodate the need to address the declining numbers and maintenance. The article said that maintenance costs to address the district’s six oldest buildings will cost in excess of $30 million.

Five school buildings in Wisconsin's Racine Unified School District date to the early 1900s, including Bull Early Education Center (BEE Center), where Kari Schaefer is a speech and language pathologist. Schaefer and her colleagues had longstanding concerns about air ventilation in the building. “Air often just didn’t seem like it was moving through the building as it should,” she says.

Educators in Racine spoke up with these concerns when they were told to report to their buildings in January in anticipation of students returning in March. After a year of remote learning due to the COVID-19 pandemic, half of families opted to send their children back for in-person learning.

As staff at the BEE Center prepared for students, district safety inspectors who toured the building reported that ventilation at the school was up to par. 

Schaefer and her colleagues weren’t at all convinced. “It never felt right to us. I just knew that something was off,” she recalls.

Schafer is a member of Racine Educators United, which, with the National Education Association (NEA), proposed a joint union/district safety walkthrough. District leaders agreed. Following the safety checklist created by NEA, inspectors returned to the school one morning and entered a first-floor classroom. The inspector took a long stick with a piece of tissue paper attached to the end and held it up to the vents. 

“Lo and behold—the tissue didn't move,” Schaefer recalls. “The ventilation was supposed to be running 24/7 and it clearly wasn’t.”

The district quickly corrected the issue, reprograming the timer of the system to ensure a constant flow of air.

Voters rejected a $30 million bond in 2020 and two measures with total funding of $62.5 million were not enough to pay for construction, forcing the district to secure a bridge loan to keep construction moving forward.
San Benito High School is nearing completion of numerous construction projects, after overcoming a shortfall in bond money. The upgrades will settle a list of safety problems, improve technology and promote career education.
The entire project was originally funded through local bond measures G and U, plus state matching and grant funds for a total cost of $102.5 million, according to SBHS District Superintendent Shawn Tennenbaum. 
The money saga began with two county ballot measures, G in 2014, and U in 2016. They spawned $62.5 million in bonds for facility repairs and upgrades. But in 2020 voters turned down Measure L, which would have raised $30 million to improve student safety by installing secure school entrances, fencing, cameras and a multipurpose cafeteria building for assemblies. If it had passed it would have added a 10th bond on every property owner’s tax bill. 
The two bond issues allowed completion of 34 projects plus part of a science and robotics building. Measure G covered, for example, roof repairs and seismic safety upgrades. Measure U, which made local property owners responsible for repaying $60 million at $30 per $100,000 of assessed value of their homes over 30 years, funded new classrooms and better IT hardware among other projects.
According to the 2019 independent audit report of measures G and U, 14 unfinished projects remained, totaling $16.2 million in commitments.
 

The Philadelphia school district will move forward with installing air purifiers in nearly every city classroom despite criticism from an air quality researcher that the purifiers are insufficient to curb the spread of COVID-19 and that some could produce harmful chemicals.

Officials met with Michael Waring, a professor of environmental engineering at Drexel University, on Monday as a “courtesy” to discuss his concerns, said Monica Lewis, a district spokesperson. But she said his input won’t change the district’s decision.

Chief Operating Officer Reggie McNeil believes the devices are safe, she said, and the district consulted other air quality specialists after Waring raised his concerns. Lewis didn’t name the other air quality specialists or say what they told the district.

The district purchased more than 9,500 air purifiers for $4.5 million and plans to install them by the end of the month, Lewis said. She said the district used the same purifiers in some classrooms during the spring’s hybrid learning.

Waring said he’s “deeply disappointed” that the district is sticking with the products.

The purifiers purchased by the district use ActivePure technology, which neutralizes viruses by pulling oxygen and water molecules into a “patented honeycomb matrix” and releasing “powerful oxidizers” back into the room, according to its website. District officials said at last week’s press conference that the technology was “originally developed for NASA” and could eliminate 99% of the virus “within three minutes.”

Waring said the purifiers only generate one-tenth the amount of airflow needed to effectively neutralize airborne viral particles in the average-sized classroom, and the emission of oxidizers could be “harmful to human health” and aggravate respiratory conditions like asthma.

In an effort to better understand the current and future needs of its school buildings, Lynchburg City Schools is moving forward with a $400,000 facilities study.
At its Tuesday night work session, the Lynchburg City School Board unanimously voted to award the contract for the study to Dominion Seven Architects, a Lynchburg-based architectural and planning firm.
Lynchburg City Schools Superintendent Crystal Edwards said the results of the study will be used to inform the division’s future capital improvement projects, as well as attendance zones and placement of future schools.
Steve Gatzke, senior director of finance and operations for the school division, said city and school leaders began discussions about a facilities study last fall and were interested in three main areas of study: a facility condition assessment to review the physical condition of the division’s buildings, a demographics study to analyze the division’s attendance zones and enrollment, and a future of education plan that would predict what education in the city might look like in 20 years and how the division would get there.
Funding for the study will come from the division’s capital improvement plan that was developed by school and city leaders in the fall: $200,000 was budgeted as a line item in the five-year plan, and the remaining $200,000 will be borrowed from the more than $1 million contingency fund in the CIP and replaced by savings from several ongoing smaller projects, Gatzke said. The city owns the division’s buildings, he said, and funds Lynchburg City Schools’ annual capital improvement plan.
 

Work on new concrete and landscaping is making headway at Armuchee High School and it all should be ready before students return to school Aug. 5.
Facilities Manager Jack Gardner said the exterior renovation is going well, despite some setbacks during construction.
While replacing one of the bus canopies, they found that the original had not been properly anchored to the ground, Gardner said. Now workers are preparing the area so that the new one will be more secure and sturdy.
“The tower is basically done, it just needs some metal and the logo added to it,” Gardner said.
The tower, or cupola, will mostly serve an aesthetic purpose for the school. The rest of the modernization project will include matching the brick exterior to the new gym.
The roof replacement was completed back in May, but construction workers are also preparing it for the upcoming air conditioning and heating unit replacements next summer.
The project was originally set at $25 million and funded through the 1-cent education local option sales tax, according to Superintendent Glenn White. But over time, with increasing inflation costs and special grants from the federal CARES and American Rescue Plan acts, the school board has boosted the budget to $31 million.
Since FCS has more high school classrooms available across the school system, the Georgia Department of Education said they couldn’t help with reimbursement for a new Armuchee building. So the board decided to do a complete overhaul and renovation of the existing building instead.
 

Montclair schools Superintendent Jonathan Ponds says he’s been losing sleep over the state of his district’s buildings.
“Our buildings are very old. They need repair. It’s going to cost money,” Ponds told Board of Education members when they came together for a “retreat” meeting on July 14. “The time is now.”
And he says he’ll be bringing that message to the community in the coming weeks and months as the district lays out plans to fix its facilities.
The state of school buildings has long been an area of concern for Montclair’s school leadership and the community it serves. Ponds said it’s a matter of student safety, and that he’s been talking to those close to him — to his wife, his colleagues, his executive assistant — about how much the problems trouble him.
“I had to say it openly and put that test in front of me,” Ponds said at the retreat. “We have to do it.”
In 2018, a stairwell collapsed at Montclair High School, and inspections that followed found several were structurally deficient, prompting work to demolish and rebuild them. In February of 2020, the state Department of Health cited the district for a series of issues at Montclair High School and its George Innes Annex — some procedural, but some for facilities failings such as broken ventilators, inoperable windows and water damage to walls and ceilings. 
In the fall, engineers  EI Associates identified $26 million worth of work needed to fix extensive ventilation problems as schools were struggling to reopen amid the coronavirus pandemic — finding many rooms had no ventilation at all.