The St. Paul school board on Tuesday approved a five-year construction plan that features two big school renovations and scores of smaller projects throughout the city.
“SPPS Builds” is the new brand name for a major building initiative started by Superintendent Valeria Silva, who in 2016 increased yearly construction spending to $112 million from around $30 million.
After early cost estimates proved wildly inaccurate, Superintendent Joe Gothard halted construction planning in 2019 and ordered an external review that produced 52 recommendations for changing their processes.
John Brodrick, the only current board member who was in office in 2016, cast the lone vote against the new plan on Tuesday.
He said he’s read hundreds of pages from the facilities department and kept finding the same kind of language that “confounded and frustrated” him in the early years of the construction spree. He noted that many of the review team’s recommendations remain “in progress” or “under consideration.”
“I have not been convinced that the plan presented tonight will be a significant improvement over the plan that went awry,” Brodrick said.
 

Talks between Gov. Phil Murphy’s office and legislative leadership about plans for the nearly-broke Schools Development Authority have stalled, according to the SDA chief.
Authority CEO Manuel Da Silva told lawmakers on Tuesday that prior to the pandemic, Murphy, Senate President Steve Sweeney and Assembly Speaker Craig Coughlin had been engaged in discussions about the future of the SDA and how to go about funding the agency responsible for construction in some of the state’s neediest school districts.
When Covid-19 gripped the state, those discussions understandably took a backseat, Da Silva said.
Still, as Murphy — who’s seeking reelection this year — continues to urge schools across New Jersey to reopen for in-person learning, and has expressed a desire to see all schools operating in classrooms in some form by the fall, conversations about the SDA have not picked up with the same urgency.
“As we stand right here — or sit right here — I can't tell you where those discussions are at, I'm not sure,” Da Silva testified at a virtual hearing of the Joint Committee on the Public Schools.
Many school buildings in New Jersey are crumbling, poorly ventilated and overcrowded, but the SDA and the state have no thorough accounting of the overall needs.
 

WESTERLY — The Town Council has made it official — its members say they will not support a school building project that requires borrowing more than $50 million.
The council voted 7-0 Monday to approve a resolution stating its support of "a potential bond referendum for the School Building Committee's plans for the potential construction, renovation, improvement, alteration, repair, furnishing, and equipping of schools and/or school facilities in the town in an amount not to exceed $50 million."
Councilors agreed that the resolution does not allow for a higher amount based on anticipated reimbursement from the state. The state has established a base 35% reimbursement rate for towns and cities that undertake school building projects. Higher reimbursement rates are available for meeting standards set by the state.
"An acceptable limit is what was really needed ... this council is being prudent and looking at our budget and what we can afford in the short term. In the long term it gets better," said Councilor Christopher Duhamel, who along with Councilor Brian McCuin serves on the School Committee's Building Subcommittee as council representatives.
The council, in recent weeks, has studied the town's debt obligations and upcoming capital projects. Anticipated borrowing for a school building project, officials say, must fit in with the need for a $12 to $15 million sewer plant upgrade and road projects.
 

KINGSPORT — Kingsport City Schools officials unveiled a nearly $68.7 million, 10-year capital plan to the Board of Mayor and Aldermen in a joint work session between the city board and school board on Tuesday.

The largest single chunk of the $68.689 million in proposed spending, $18 million, would go to refurbishing, renovating and modifying the current Sullivan North High/Middle School into the new Sevier Middle School in time for an August 2023 opening.

That is $2 million less than the $20 million the city paid Sullivan County Schools for the North building, over which the city is to gain control in June.

The funding also would pay for converting the current Sevier into the new Jackson Elementary by August 2024, but Superintendent Jeff Moorhouse said the plan would literally touch most every school in the system, including the replacement of existing lighting with more energy-efficient lighting in most schools and a roof replacement at Dobyns-Bennett High School.

The Jasper School District has been notified by the Arkansas Division of Emergency Management that the school district's application for federal funds to construct a community safe room on the Jasper campus has been approved. Dr. Candra Brasel, school district superintendent, informed the board of the approval Monday night, March 15, at its regular monthly meeting.
Notification was received via a letter dated March 9. The Hazard Mitigation staff at FEMA Region 6 completed the review of the school district's grant application and funding was obligated on March 2. The grant awards the school district $981,618.20 or 75% of the project cost. That would leave the district's non-federal share at $327,206.07. The project was estimated to cost $1,308,824.27, but actual cost estimates have not been secured through formal architect planning and the bidding process.
The school district applied for funding based on the need of a safe room for 624 people at the Jasper K-12 campus. This reinforced structure would be available as a safe gathering place for students and staff in case of a tornado or other emergency during the school day, but would also be available to the community during after school hours.

ST. GEORGE — New buildings are going up throughout the Washington County School District, with two new schools under construction and renovations underway at two existing high schools. 
Near the Arizona/Utah border, construction at Desert Canyons Elementary School is nearing completion. Hughes General Contractor Superintendent Ron Densley said his crews have been hard at work since construction began in April 2020, and he plans to turn over the finished building to the school district by May 1.
“We plan on opening in August with about 400 students,” said Steven Dunham, district communications director. “At peak efficiency, we’ll be able to serve about 650 students, though there’s infrastructure in place to add up to three portables. Each portable can have two classrooms, so with up to 30 students to a class you could serve 180 more.”
The projected cost of construction for Desert Canyons Elementary School is $13 million. The elementary, along with the other building projects underway, were part of the school district’s most recent bond, Dunham said.
 

A preliminary feasibility study conducted by the Littlestown Area School District (LASD) has identified substantial problems with its buildings and infrastructure.

The study, conducted by RLPS Architects and presented to the school board by Chris Linky and Andy Blaydon, provided 1 to 5 ratings of each of the three evaluated school buildings in the district. The determination showed Alloway Creek Elementary School with a 3.33 rating and Littlestown High School at a 2.67 rating which suggested they would need light to medium renovations. But the Maple Avenue Middle School was rated at 1.72 meaning it needs heavy renovations or demolition.

The report, which is only about half completed, said systems in all three schools are approaching or already past their expected 20-year replacement timeframe.

The middle school, which was originally built in 1932, was the main focus of the report, which noted major problems. According to the report the building has asbestos-containing materials, equipment and systems past their service life, and single-loaded corridors. The report also noted a need for separating public and education spaces and updating of the classrooms and labs.

RUSK COUNTY, Texas — Despite the Great Depression of the 1930s, money was flowing from the oil fields of East Texas. Little towns like New London in Rusk County were prosperous for many, so much so that the community built a new school to educate grades five through 12.
It was heralded as one of the most modern in Texas. To provide heat in winter, school officials saved taxpayers $300 a month to pipe in natural gas from the oil fields. It was a tragic mistake.
At 3:17 p.m. the afternoon of March 18, 1937, the school building exploded.
A young Associated Press reporter who went on to fame as a television news anchor, Walter Cronkite, covered the story. He would later write in his book, "A Reporter's Life," that “two minutes before classes were to be dismissed for the weekend, a student in the basement woodworking shop switched off a band saw. The spark did its work.”
 

County Council members Steve McKay and Jerry Donald are making another attempt to update school construction fees countywide.
School construction, or mitigation, fees are paid by developers who want to build homes in areas where schools are already crowded at well over 100 percent of state-rated capacity. The state helps determine the overall fee through a school construction cost index, which includes metrics like pupil rates, the cost to build schools and several other factors. 
Last year, McKay (R) said one of his greatest regrets so far while serving on the council was not getting school construction fees legislation passed. The proposal was first approached about two years ago when the topic was brought before the council for a workshop.
Donald (D) and Councilman Kai Hagen (D) join McKay as co-sponsors on his latest bill. The fee increases for a single-family detached home, townhouse/duplex and other residential units are similar to his and Donald's proposal from 2019 — potentially costing thousands of dollars depending on the school and housing type.
McKay and Donald have argued the council needs to update the fees in order to prevent schools from becoming more crowded, and they say developers need to pay a fair share for rising school costs and building in profitable real estate areas.
 

MEDFORD, Ore. — On Friday, the CDC delivered news that many school districts have been eagerly awaiting — a recommendation that spacing between students in classrooms can be safely cut in half in many classroom settings. In practice, the change would allow most districts to ditch hybrid learning and return to full-time schedules on school campuses.
However, the CDC update does not spell any immediate change for local districts. The implementation, if it happens before the end of the school year, will come only after receiving the green light from state officials at the Oregon Health Authority and Oregon Department of Education.
In a press conference on Friday, not long after the CDC change was announced, Governor Kate Brown briefly addressed the news — saying that ODE officials are now reviewing the guidance and will consider making changes to the state's existing playbook.
"Nothing changes for us until they make that commitment and decision," said Kirk Kolb, superintendent of the Grants Pass School District. "I would just echo [that we're] committed to bringing all students back every day, to the maximum extent possible."
Administrators at multiple districts across southern Oregon were already advocating for the reduced spacing requirement. The Klamath County School Board resolved to write Governor Brown two weeks ago, and the Grants Pass School Board followed suit last week. On Friday, Medford School District superintendent Dr. Bret Champion revealed that his district has done the same, along with a request for more "local control" in implementing the new guidance.
"Moving from six-feet to three-feet isn't the ultimate goal," Champion said. "The ultimate goal is to safely get all of our students back into our classrooms, so that's what we're hoping to be able to do."
 

CASPER, Wyo. — The Wyoming Senate passed a resolution on Friday that would put a question before voters to amend the Wyoming Constitution to transfer responsibility for school facilities construction and maintenance off of the state’s shoulders and onto school districts.
“We’ve got a problem,” Sen. Charles Scott (Natrona County) said. “Our school capital construction system that we’ve had can no longer work because the principal funding source, which was coal lease bonuses, is gone and is not going to come back. We all know that.”
“We’ve got to do something different.”
Senate Joint Resolution 04 would put a question on the ballot asking voters to amend the Constitution such that the primary responsibility to provide school facilities would be reverted to school districts.
“This is the best I could come up with because it switches the principal decision making to the voters of the local districts whose taxes will go up if they pass the bond issue,” Scott said.
He said that the benefit of the proposal is that voters would be asked to approve expenditures for local school facility construction and maintenance: “If you vote for it, your taxes will go up.”
“How much taxes go up and how much we have to pay for equalization is unknown,” Scott said.
The proposed amendment would require the legislature to establish law for public school capital construction that would be subject to the following:
 

MONTPELIER — The pandemic didn’t prevent the Montpelier Roxbury Public School Board from taking a virtual tour of the district’s four schools — one roughly 17 miles away from the others — on Wednesday night.
Though Chairman Jim Murphy said he plans to schedule in-person visits to each of the schools over the summer, Facilities Director Andrew LaRosa gave board members who haven’t been in the buildings lately — or in some cases at all — a taste of what they’ll see.
LaRosa walked the board through a 52-page facilities report — a living document amended annually in an effort to track work done and projects that still need doing.
Both lists are long.
The report outlines recent projects ranging from the new playground at Union Elementary School and the new basketball court at Main Street Middle School to last year’s COVID-related ventilation upgrades at those schools, as well as at Roxbury Village School and Montpelier High School.
It includes a building-by-building analysis with rough recommendations LaRosa said are intentionally short on specifics.
If you’re looking for schedules and cost estimates you won’t find them in the report because, LaRosa told board members, most of the recommendations are moving targets and costs will depend on when they’re tackled and what the solution looks like.
Take the windows at the district’s two oldest buildings — Union Elementary and Main Street Middle School.
 

When checking in with all-virtual classes, Havre de Grace Middle School Principal James Johnson would get replies from students via online chat, or at times no answer at all.
On Wednesday, in the midst of the week middle and high school students throughout Harford County returned for in-person learning, Johnson was in the Havre de Grace Middle/High School cafeteria — named Warrior Hall — chatting with students and answering their questions as they ate their lunches.
“Here, you see kids being kids again, just engaging socially with each other,” Johnson said.
The cafeteria was not crowded, as secondary students are returning for in-person classes on a one-day-a-week hybrid basis. More are expected to return when the hybrid expands to four days a week in early April, following spring break. The youths were also separated by plexiglass dividers on each table, and students and staff throughout the building wore masks in order to prevent the spread of COVID-19.
 

Improving schools' ventilation systems won't only help keep kids safe from COVID-19, but may also improve their academic performance in the process.

Why it matters: As schools figure out what they need to do to safely resume in-person classes, some experts are advocating for options — like better air filtration — that would yield added benefits beyond the pandemic.

The big picture: Good ventilation is the most effective and practical way to clear a space of contaminants, like COVID-19.

For decades, studies have also linked better ventilation to increases in productivity, morale and even cognitive function.
Conversely, poor indoor air quality, sometimes known as "sick building syndrome," can cause morale problems and absences due to respiratory infections or allergies, according to the Environmental Protection Agency.
The state of play: 54% of public school districts have outdated ventilation systems, a 2020 GAO analysis says.

GREENWICH — In her fifth-grade son’s six years at Old Greenwich School, Meg Nolan has observed, at times with alarm, a series of structural issues at the building.
Most recently, Nolan and other parents at Old Greenwich, Julian Curtiss, Riverside and North Mianus — all of which were closed briefly in the wake of a ceiling collapse and flood at North Mianus — received a report from an engineering firm about the state of the buildings.
The report, available on the district’s website, provides short summaries on the structural integrity of the ceilings at each building, all of which were originally constructed before the 1950s. It found that the ceilings were not in danger of collapse at the other schools and was cited by the district in its decision to return students to in-person learning Feb. 26.
But a line at the end of the Old Greenwich section of the report stuck out to Nolan.
“It should be noted that the ceiling penetrations were extensive at this school,” the original version of the report said. (A subsequent version, with slightly different language, is now available online.) “We recommend further investigation into potential code and environmental issues stemming from these ceiling penetrations.”
The failure to investigate further, Nolan said, is emblematic of the district’s regular approach to these kinds of structural issues.
 

JEFFERSON COUNTY, Ala. (WBRC) - Schools are always looking at new ways to keep students, faculty, and staff safe during severe weather, and now even the way schools are built has new guidance.

Deputy Superintendent of Operations for Jefferson County Schools, Neal Underwood, said back in 2012, the Alabama legislature passed a bill that requires all new school construction to have storm shelters in the building, and any additions to existing buildings will have to be able to withstand winds of up to 250 miles per hour.

Underwood said the school district is in the process of building six new schools, and all of them will have a wing designed to be a storm shelter.

Warrior Elementary School just opened on March 8 and it also meets those new specifications.

The 80,000 square-foot building has three wings on the back, one of which is a storm shelter that safely houses all students, faculty and staff in the event of a tornado, or other severe weather.

“The roofing is different from normal roofing on an area that is not a storm shelter, the walls, whether it’s the block with poured concrete with rebar, all of those are designed differently. The heating and air components to that particular area is designed differently…and that’s so that if we ever have to go in there and then there is damage, we can sustain ourselves inside that area for several hours,” Underwood explained.

PORTLAND, OR (KPTV) - In just two weeks, all of Oregon’s public schools will have to start offering on-site or hybrid learning for elementary students.

The same goes for older grades starting in mid-April.

Monday the Oregon Department of Education released updated guidance for when kids go back, and the state’s largest district, Portland Public Schools, shared its plans.

The new state guidance makes clear that in the coming weeks hybrid or on-site learning will become the primary model for all K through 12 public schools, only unless there are extreme rates of COVID-19 transmission in the community.

And all schools do still have to continue to provide distance learning as an option for any family that prefers that instead.

"We’re surviving but it hasn’t been easy for us," Shane Kennedy said. "I just mentioned to my boys that in two weeks we are going to start up with school and they said yay, they’re excited to go see their friends."

He has a first grader and third grader in Portland Public Schools. Under the district’s plan they’ll each be starting hybrid learning April 1 and April 5 respectively.

ODE's guidance including everything from cleaning protocol to responding to an outbreak.

Face coverings will be required for all students kindergarten and up and staff.

If needed, students can take a quick face covering break for no more than three to five minutes and they should be more than six feet from anyone else.

Public school infrastructure is a topic familiar to most Vermonters.
School districts and supervisory unions have not been shy about their struggles to pay for facilities improvements. From making basic upgrades to meet modern educational standards to addressing major health concerns like environmental contaminants in the water and air, the needs are great and varied.
In recent years, districts have asked residents to help address those needs through multimillion-dollar bonds with varying degrees of success. More often, however, they slowly chip away at the problem in their annual budgets.
The coronavirus pandemic only highlighted those deficiencies. As schools worked to reopen safely, poorly functioning ventilation systems and inadequate spaces for social distancing hindered progress and made for less-than-ideal conditions — finally forcing a conversation the state has been putting off for too long, according to some school officials.
Now, a new bill is looking to help the state get its arms around its aging schools.
Introduced by the House Committee on Education, H.426, would create an inventory of the state’s K-12 school facilities needs and develop a plan for addressing them.
“It’s no secret that we have had some school buildings in trouble,” said Rep. Kathryn Webb, D-Shelburne, chair of the Education Committee, who pointed to the abrupt closure of Burlington High School last fall after dangerous levels of cancer-causing PCBs were detected inside the building.
 

CHARLESTON, WV (WOWK) — 30 county school superintendents are making their pitches to the West Virginia School Building Authority over the next two days. They’re asking for millions of dollars in grant funding for school construction projects.
Cabell County Schools Superintendent Ryan Saxe was one of the first presenters asking for up to $10 million toward a new Meadows Elementary.
“In Cabell County we have a long standing tradition of working well with the School Building Authority and being able to modernize and build our buildings across our school district,” Saxe said.
He said the money coupled with local dollars would help build a more modern school.
“I think the possibilities for this site are absolutely endless. It is going to provide a world class learning experience for our students,” Saxe said.
Kanawha County Schools Superintendent Tom Williams made his first-ever pitch to the SBA. The proposal is to renovate and add-on to the Cedar Grove Middle School facility and transition it to Cedar Grove Elementary while sending the middle school students from Cedar Grove to Dupont.
“We have too many facilities in Kanawha County,” Dr. Williams said. “We keep losing students so we need to start paring down our facilities.”
There is a meeting Tuesday night in Cedar Grove. The board will hear input from the community and decide if it will move forward with the plan. Williams said the timing isn’t ideal, pitching to the SBA before the school board vote, but there was no way around it.
“I made the pitch. If they decide not to do it then that means another county will have the opportunity to get some money,” he said.
 

SHOSHONI – Annie Good and her co-teacher have made their fifth grade classroom a homey space for their 33 students. The room is in the south wing of the sprawling K-12 education complex in Shoshoni, a town of 649 people.
The $49 million school building, up the road from the abandoned storefronts downtown, can make visitors look twice, said Christopher Konija, Shoshoni’s police chief, who is also town clerk and treasurer.
“It’s like looking at two different worlds,” he said. “To me, the school – what it looks like and what it represents – shows the potential for Shoshoni.”
State spends big on K-12
The state-built, modern building is just one brick-and-mortar example of how Wyoming has poured its mineral wealth into its school system ever since the state Supreme Court heard a series of cases – starting in 1980 – challenging the equity and adequacy of school funding in Wyoming. In 1995, the court found that legislators were, indeed, responsible for budgeting enough money to fund a ”quality” education for all Wyoming children. And though such findings are not uncommon nationally, the result in Wyoming has been to make it the biggest spender per student in the Mountain West and one of the biggest in the United States.