COLUMBIANA —  Shelby County Schools has begun final repairs at two of the school district’s facilities that were damaged during recent tornadoes, including a middle school and football stadium.
The Board of Education approved construction bids for the repairs during its monthly meeting on June 22, and repairs are now currently underway and expected to go through the summer. David Calhoun, the school district’s assistant superintendent of operation, is currently overseeing the construction projects, and said that the school district is making great progress on the repairs.
“We’ve had very good luck so far and have made fantastic progress at this point in time in the summer. Summers are generally the time that we will do any replacement of flooring or ceiling tiles as well as do any painting,” he said. “For kids, it is a slow down time because they go home, but in the world of school maintenance and operation, that’s really when things ramp up.”
The most pressing repairs pertain to the Oak Mountain High School Football Stadium at Heardmont Park, which suffered extensive damage due to an EF3 tornado on March 25 of this year.
 

 Just over $450 million for nine new Ohio K-12 building projects was announced Thursday by the state commission that oversees funding of school construction, the second of two major spending packages for school construction and renovation as the coronavirus pandemic has eased.
The projects announced by the Ohio Facilities Construction Commission include $117 million for Cleveland city schools, which will use the money to build two new pre-K through eighth grade buildings and a new high school, and to renovate a middle school. The Cleveland project includes $37.5 million in local funding.
The money also will provide $103.2 million for Lancaster city schools in southeastern Ohio, including $56.8 million in local funding, to build a new high school that will also house a career tech program.
Spending approved Thursday also includes $29 million for Metro Early College High School in Columbus, a K-12 STEM school that will move into a renovated Columbus middle school.
 

Issues related to deferred maintenance and aging buildings are an ongoing concern for districts nationwide, the School District of Amery is no exception.

Last Monday evening, professional performance contractor, Kraus Anderson, made a presentation to the School District of Amery Board of Education regarding deferred maintenance needs in the School District. Deferred maintenance can best be defined as that which needs to be fixed. The focus of the presentation was an identification of items which are the highest priority maintenance needs for each of the School District’s four buildings.

Schoolboards are facing the challenges of maintaining and upgrading aging buildings and their inner workings. They're grappling with questions such as, how much should they invest in these structures and what are the consequences of delaying investment?

In recent years, the School District of Amery has intentionally kept a much closer eye on the maintenance needs of its buildings due to the increased age of each school. The high school and elementary school are 45 and 54 years old, respectively. The other two buildings of the School District, the middle school and intermediate school, are not new, at 29 and 20 years old. With time comes the increased reality of maintenance needs, and that is what has occurred. There have been and still are maintenance problems in each of the school buildings.

SPARTA, NJ – The heating and air conditioning replacements at Helen Morgan and Alpine Elementary schools hit a “little hiccup” when mold was discovered behind old units as they were being removed.
“We were not expecting mold but we were not surprised,” Superintendent Matthew Beck said. “The systems are old, that’s why they are being replaced.”
Students and staff are not affected by the discovery, according to Beck.  He said Helen Morgan school is not running any summer programs and the mold was found in an area of the Alpine school that is segregated away from students and staff using the building. 
Beck said air samples had been taken and results were anticipated by the end of the week.  The mold was limited to the area behind the air conditioning units and the “affected drywall and beams behind the sheetrock have been removed.” Once results are back, they expect to replace the drywall, unless further remediation is needed.
Not all of the HVAC units in the Alpine Elementary School were scheduled to be replaced as they are newer but “out of an abundance of caution,” Beck said the district will be checking all of the units.
 

The Princeton Public Schools (PPS) Board of Education (BOE) is committed to planning ahead, working towards a July 29 deadline to submit an application to the state to place a major maintenance bond referendum on the ballot in January 2022, so that work to replace leaking roofs at several schools can start by the summer of 2022.

The BOE is considering a cost figure “likely less than $20 million,” but further discussion must take place in the coming weeks to determine the work to be done, when it must be done, and the estimated cost. The BOE anticipates that with debt from prior referendums maturing on February 1, 2022 and 2023, all the work can be done without increasing debt service from current levels.

“Princeton Public Schools will use the next three weeks to evaluate the scope of a potential maintenance referendum,” the district noted in a July 6 statement. “It is anticipated that on July 27 the Board of Education will authorize a submission to the New Jersey Department of Education by Spiezle, the district’s architect, detailing preliminary eligible costs.”

A number of the roofs in question are approaching 26 years old, already beyond warranty, and several other leaky roofs are about 17 years old with warranties soon to expire. Other urgent maintenance projects include repairing facades at some schools, repairing siding and gutters, and replacing “end-of-life” building systems.

“This work is completely necessary,” said Business Administrator Matt Bouldin at the June 29 Board meeting, noting many problems with leaky classrooms during the past school year. “Last fall, trying to get our kids back into the schools — it was not a pretty sight. And roof leaks deteriorate the structure.”

Last week, the Spokane Public Schools board of directors examined and revised a draft of its proposed "equity policy," which states that the school district "values diverse schools and communities and is committed to providing excellence for everyone."

About an hour later, the same board approved a school boundary proposal that some experts argue will hamper the district's racial equity goals by reducing diversity in its schools.

"To be an equity-based organization, which Spokane Public Schools declared they would be last year, that means you have to be not thinking about privileged students but thinking about marginalized students and how to decrease opportunity gaps for them," says Suzie Henning, an assistant professor of education at Eastern Washington University. "This seems to be moving in the other direction."

The school boundary proposal has stirred a debate around what equity means in a district with high rates of low-income students. Historically, school districts across the country have drawn attendance zones in ways that separate students by race and class. Advocates have pushed for districts to "desegregate" these schools, with research backing up the idea that having schools with more socioeconomic diversity can benefit disadvantaged students.

But the new Spokane school boundaries, like the old ones, will leave Spokane schools on the north end of town with consistently higher rates of students on free or reduced lunch than the southside schools.

The American Rescue Plan provides an historic federal investment at a crucial moment for America’s K-12 public schools. The funds are providing critical support for principals as they face an array of pressing challenges: expanding summer learning opportunities, implementing academic recovery interventions and addressing a wide range of student mental health needs. But to unleash the plan’s enormous potential and fully maximize student learning, Congress must also address an issue that preceded the pandemic: outdated and crumbling K-12 facilities due to decades of underinvestment. As negotiations on infrastructure continue, we are urging the inclusion of $100 billion in direct grants and $30 billion in bonds for K-12 public school facilities — consistent with the Reopen and Rebuild America's Schools Act. 

The neglect of K-12 school infrastructure hampers tens of thousands of schools throughout the country, posing significant health and safety risks to millions of students. According to the 2016 State of Our Schools Report, state and local governments underfund K-12 facilities by $46 billion annually. A recent Government Accountability Office study paints a troubling picture: in about one quarter of all school districts, at least half of their schools needed upgrades or replacements to major building systems, such as heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) systems, plumbing, wiring, or windows. The study also found 41 percent of districts need to update or replace HVAC systems in at least half of their schools. A leaking roof or HVAC system can cause water damage, exposing students and staff to mold or asbestos.

Since 2000, Williamson County Schools records show a jump in the district's annual enrolled student population from over 19,600 students at the end of the first month of the 2000-2001 school year to over 40,700 students at the end of the first month of the 2019-2020 school year.
In two decades, school enrollment increased by almost 108%, with an average annual growth of 1,057 students. Between 2002 and 2019, 19 schools opened across the county.
Superintendent Jason Golden shared in reports this year that even despite the pandemic, population growth across the county is projected to continue according to planners in local jurisdictions.
Williamson County Schools' five-year capital plan includes construction projects geared toward accommodating this continued, rapid population growth across the county.
 

After years of lip service, the federal government is finally taking meaningful steps toward repairing our national infrastructure. The White House’s revised plan promises to improve and expand railways, rebuild roads and bridges, and provide universal internet access. What won’t it do? Repair our crumbling schools.

In October last year, as debates over whether schools could safely reopen raged in Philadelphia and nationwide, the education outlet Chalkbeat reported that two-thirds of Philly elementary classrooms failed to meet minimum ventilation standards, which measure the airflow rate per person. Fifteen schools did not have a single classroom that could safely accommodate more than 14 students.

The School District, pushing for school reopenings, suggested using box fans to alleviate these concerns, but such an ad-hoc solution alarmed parents and teachers. Unfortunately, more substantial repairs are likely out of reach for the district: One 2017 analysis estimated that fixing ventilation in city schools could cost a prohibitive $600 million.

Philadelphia and many districts across the country cannot afford to make needed repairs to their school buildings, which is why in March the Biden administration proposed to allocate $100 billion for this purpose in its infrastructure plan. This represents a huge — and rare — opportunity to make necessary and important investments in school infrastructure.

After dangerous black mold was found in Weed Elementary School's buildings, the district is constructing a new, state-of-the-art campus. 

People in the neighborhood of the school are seeing bulldozers and ground movers working in the school's field. This summer, portable module buildings as an interim temporary campus will be popping up for the next school year as the school will be torn down and rebuilt due to black mold and other structural noncompliance issues. 

In October 2020, the school's main building, quad rooms, and music room were found to be contaminated with black mold in the walls and closed down. Inspections showed that the 60s style construction of the school's buildings that were designed for Southern California has open rafters and can not meet the snow load compliance. It was also found that the building that houses the water boiler not only contains asbestos and lead paint, but is also not seismically sound. So that building, too, will be replaced.  

The Bowling Green City Schools Board of Education is going to start a capital improvements program which may include renovations and additions to existing buildings as well as new construction.

At Tuesday’s meeting, the board also approved spending $333,884 for boiler work at two elementaries.

The board hired Fanning/Howey Associates to design a master plan.

Fanning/Howey will perform an onsite review of facilities to determine current conditions, using the 2015 Ohio Facilities Construction Commission facility assessment as baseline data.

“I think this is certainly a very positive step forward to address the needs of our district’s academic facilities,” said Superintendent Francis Scruci.

The architects also will gather existing site information to identify current conditions and possible constraints; facilitate an educational visioning process with staff to understand facilities improvements that may be needed to support curriculum delivery goals; facilitate a community engagement process to share facilities data and to gather stakeholder preferences regarding facilities improvements.

They will then develop a facilities master plan that summarizes all recommended improvements and related budgets and offer conceptual graphic representations to help illustrate facilities improvement goals.

The cost to the district is not to exceed $40,000.

HUNTSVILLE, Ala. — Alabama engineers, architects, fire chiefs and school leaders are concerned about recently passed legislation they believe compromises the safety of children in schools. Governor Kay Ivey signed HB 220 last month. The bill ends state oversight of construction projects for school buildings under certain parameters.
Prior to the legislation, architects and school districts would submit construction plans to the Division of Construction Management. The DCM would almost always find a few code violations by even the best architects. Soon, any project under $500,000 will no longer go through the DCM and instead will be up to local building departments. Some projects above $500,000 will also qualify under the new legislation.
“Down the road, 5-10 years… we are really going to start to see the faults in this,” said Tim Love the President of the Alabama Association of Fire Chief’s.
Love doesn’t think the legislature took time to hear concerns or even read about HB 220.
“I really don’t think they clearly understood or I hope they didn’t understand what they were voting for. I heard one Senator say from the floor, all 67 counties have a building department. That’s not true,” said Love.
Governor Ivey, despite signing the bill is forming a committee to iron out concerns from builders, fire departments and schools. All the concerned parties hope the legislation ends up getting thrown out or reversed.
Engineers and builders stand to gain from the legislation because their liability increases, meaning they can charge more. Even then, the engineers and architects prefer having a third, un-biased party to check over building plans.
“I’m assuming it’s pretty bad if the men and women that can make money off of this process, don’t want it, we probably need to listen to them,” said Love.
 

Officials and students broke ground on a new Walker Mill Middle School on Monday, one of six school projects that will begin construction this week in Prince George’s County, Maryland.

The new Walker Mill is the first of six new schools intended to address aging buildings, growing enrollment and a middle school seat deficit in the state’s second-largest school system.

Schools CEO Dr. Monica Goldson said at Monday morning’s ceremony, “When I pick up that shovel, I’m going to pick it up to represent the voices of 134,000 students, 19,000 employees who deserve to work in the best facilities possible, and for all their parents who want us to create memorable experiences that will propel their students to be amazing citizens, not only in Prince George’s County, but across the nation.”

Principal Erin Cribbs said the original Walker Mill school opened in 1971, adding, “The Mill, as we affectionately call it, has and will continue to be a beacon of education for those who desire to lead, reach and impact the world.”

Before the coronavirus pandemic made airflow a life-or-death issue, ventilation experts rarely tested the air inside schools. That was probably a mistake, said Kevin Thomas, the business representative for the union representing ventilation workers in the Seattle area.
“You don’t feel the CO2 levels going up, you just start to get tired,” said Thomas of Sheet Metal Workers Union Local 66, which represents heating, ventilation and air conditioning (HVAC) workers. “The temperature rises, and you just take off your sweatshirt.”
Similar findings have been recorded by HVAC experts across the U.S. — perhaps not surprising in a country where about 36,000 schools have ventilation systems in need of attention. But replacing aging ventilation systems with new versions of the same out-of-date technology won’t be enough, warned Tony Hans, an engineer specializing in green buildings. 
“Most districts are still putting in HVAC systems that were invented and designed in the 1970s, and those are not going to get you to your health and wellness goals, or your carbon and energy-efficiency goals,” Hans said.
And the systems that regulate airflow are just one of the dozens of facility improvements Hans thinks schools are about to have a “once in a lifetime opportunity” to fix. He sees the anticipated influx of federal funding through President Joe Biden’s American Jobs Plan infrastructure proposal as a rare chance for most districts in America to make their buildings both greener and cheaper to operate. 
“It’ll be the last time they get to touch their schools for a major overhaul for 40 or 50 years,” Hans said. “This is the opportunity to really do it right.”
Judged by annual spending in public dollars, America’s K-12 school facilities are the second largest infrastructure expense in the country — only roads, rail lines and other transportation systems cost more — and repairing or improving them may offer a clear path to broad reductions in greenhouse gas emissions. Taken together, school facilities emit about 72 million metric tons of carbon dioxide each year, the equivalent of about 18 coal power plants or 8.6 million homes, according to the climate advocacy organization Generation180.
 

STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. — As temperatures warm up at the end of the school year, through the summer months, and into the 2021-2022 school year, just five Staten Island schools that have been without air conditioning (AC) in every classroom will have it installed by the end of the year, according to city officials.
Students in New York City schools have been required to wear a face mask throughout the entire school day in the current school year — even during high temperatures in classrooms without air conditioning.
Under the AC for All initiative, 37 Staten Island schools have already had air conditioning units installed in all of their classrooms, according to the city School Construction Authority (SCA).
Just five Staten Island schools are still awaiting AC units in all of their classrooms and will get those installations by the end of 2021.
Those schools are:
Egbert Intermediate School (I.S. 2), Midland Beach
Prall Intermediate School (I.S. 27), West Brighton
Morris Intermediate School (I.S. 61), Brighton Heights
PS 18, West Brighton
PS 26, Travis
 

SEWARD — It’s always difficult for Selma Casagranda’s friends to come to her birthday parties.

The recent Seward High School graduate was born in September, prime flooding season in her hometown of Seward, Alaska, on the Kenai Peninsula, which juts into the Gulf of Alaska south of Anchorage. Home to around 3,000 people, Seward sits between Resurrection Bay and the Kenai Mountains. A massive 700-square-mile glacial icefield flows out of the mountains, melting off into braided rivers and tributaries before reaching the bay’s shores. An average annual precipitation of 70 inches ensures streams flow swiftly across the landscape, sometimes flooding the only road in and out of town.

“In the fall, everybody knows, they’re ready for a flood,” Casagranda said. “It’s kind of just something we’ve gotten used to almost.”

It’s not just birthday parties the heavy rains disrupt, but also the community’s schools. Casagranda said in one classroom at Seward High School there’s a “huge leak in the ceiling panel.” And in one hallway, students walk around “a big bucket full of water all the time.”

“There’s just a lot of stuff that goes unfixed, and if something were to happen, I don’t know what we would do,” she said.

WASHINGTON (7News) — The Friends of Hardy, a community group in the District’s Ward 3, have created a petition to prevent a new school from being built at Hardy Park.
The recommendation comes from a community work group to address overcrowding at schools within the Wilson High School feeder pattern.
While the school system says the workgroup contained a number of community stakeholders, the Friends of Hardy members, say they were largely left out.
“Put an elementary school in our neighborhood, but put it in a reasonable spot,” said Tom Wolfe with Friends of Hardy.
The current recommendations include adding two schools to the area.
One of those is proposed for Hardy Park and would include elementary-aged school kids.
The other is proposed for the former school building belonging to Georgetown Day School, which is just a few blocks away, and would be for middle schoolers or high schoolers.
A final decision has not been made.
Neighbors say both schools would increase traffic in an already congested area.
They also say the school at Hardy Park would interrupt its green space and would be a waste of money since the rec center is already undergoing a multi-million dollar renovation.
“The planning here has just gone off the rails,” said Wolfe. “We need a responsible adult somewhere down at city hall to come in and take a look at other options.”
The proposal for Friends of Hardy would be to leave Hardy Park alone and turn the already existing Georgetown Day School into an elementary school.
“You could slap a coat of paint on, and it would become the local elementary school. We think that ‘s a far better idea and would save the district plenty of money,” said Wolfe.
 

School facilities took center stage this week as the Warren County and Bowling Green school boards held meetings to review their construction and renovation priorities.

On Wednesday, the Bowling Green Independent School District Board of Education reviewed design drawings for phase four renovations at Bowling Green High School.

Ultimately, the board approved the designs and authorized the school district to spend up to $22,434,420 on the project.

Superintendent Gary Fields said the revised $22.4 million project cost estimate includes a cost increase of 15% to 20% over the previous cost estimate, a change he blamed on an increased demand by school districts across the state for construction-related services.

That said, the district isn’t actually planning to start bidding the renovations until later this year.

“As of June 2021, we’re seeing some significant jumps in cost,” Fields said. “The good news is, we’re six months away from going out to bid.”

The Massachusetts School Building Authority's Board of Directors this week approved a nearly $40 million grant for the construction of a new elementary school in Fitchburg.

The $39.7 million award, which the board voted for at its meeting Wednesday, will help the district replace Crocker Elementary School with a new, 116,000-square-foot school. 

The replacement building will be at the same site as the current school, and serve first through fifth grade, according to the building authority. 

On America’s Infrastructure Report Card, our school buildings received a D-plus, indicating they are in poor and at-risk condition.

With nearly 100,000 schools across the country on about 2 million acres of land, one in every six Americans in a typical year relies on our school buildings and grounds for learning, work and wellbeing. 

As debates about America’s infrastructure continue, Congress and the Biden administration must include our schools in this critical investment not only because of their scale, use and condition, but also because this investment can benefit our economy, build community resilience, and improve the environmental and fiscal sustainability of our schools. 

The underinvestment in school buildings and campuses, estimated at about $46 billion annually, has resulted in poor indoor air quality, leaky roofs and unaddressed environmental hazards. The Government Accountability Office found nearly half of all districts need to replace one or more major building systems.

Poor air quality hurts students
The poor physical condition of our schools directly affects students' health and learning. Before the pandemic, childhood asthma, linked to exposure to poor air quality, resulted in about 13.8 million missed days of school annually. Researchers also have found that high temperatures in classrooms without sufficient cooling systems hurt student learning and performance.

With school districts often having to use local taxes to pay for maintenance and improvements, schools in lower-income communities are in worse condition, meaning students of color and low-income students are hit hardest by the poor physical conditions of our schools. 

Just as roads and bridges are essential for our economy, sustainable schools also are critical. Since the start of the pandemic, school closures have prevented parents from working, and mothers in particular have disproportionately left the workforce due to increased responsibilities for childcare at home. The poor condition of school buildings has made the reopening of schools more difficult in particular in under-resourced communities. 

It is critical to realize that any disruptions to schooling hurts women’s ability to participate and excel in the workforce. Before the pandemic and this summer, school disruptions due to excessive heat have increasingly occurred across the country. These disruptions are likely to accelerate as climate change worsens.