Christmas keeps coming a bit early for some Leon County School sites in the form of a five-year capital improvement plan.

"I made a commitment that our southside schools would look like our northside schools," Leon Schools Superintendent Rocky Hanna said. "This is part of making good on that promise."

The $180 million equitable promise, dedicated exclusively to Title I schools for renovations and improvements in the district's five-year Capital Outlay Plan, is projected to be fulfilled by 2027.

The multimillion-dollar improvements will not only help improve the aesthetics at these schools, but also potentially help boost enrollment numbers. The top-shelf improvements come as the district rebrands itself to compete for students against private and charter schools.

While many area school systems have already dismissed students for summer break, some, like Boston Public Schools, don't officially end the school year until Friday. That's a problem for the 10 BPS schools without air conditioning that must stay open during this week's heat wave, with the exception of Wednesday, the Juneteenth holiday.

BPS leaders have not announced any closures for the final two days of school. Spokesman Max Baker said the ten schools without air conditioning are too old to install cooling systems in and lack the infrastructure to support the energy demands.

He said in a written statement that the impacted schools have received fans to use in classrooms. "Students in these schools will receive cool treats, courtesy of our Food and Nutrition Services team," he added.

Eighth-grade graduates walked the stage May 16 as family members cheered them on, filling rows in the front of the Healy public school district’s auditorium.
School board members were seated at the side of the stage to congratulate the students — all three of them. Celebratory cake and punch waited outside.
The three on stage that day were enjoying what will likely be one of Healy’s final graduation ceremonies. Healy is the state’s smallest school district and it is living on borrowed time.
Healy is an extreme example — one that caught lawmakers’ attention at the end of the legislation session — but it foreshadows the challenges that rural districts and state officials will have to confront in the near future as student populations dwindle.
Eight other K-12 Kansas public school districts have fewer than 100 students. Another 28 districts have fewer than 200 students. The state has no blueprint for dealing with the declining student enrollment.
 

An interactive website that gave families crucial information about the physical condition of Philadelphia public schools went down last month.
The site contained data on 211 schools, more than two-thirds of which were found to be in “unsatisfactory” or “poor” condition, according to a previous analysis by the Logan Center. Parents could use the site to see the results of their school’s latest inspection and which aspects of the school were in the best and worst shape.
The district is currently developing a “warehouse” for data on all schools’ academics, environments, educational suitability, safety, maintenance, and enrollment, among other data points, said Alexandra Coppadge, the district’s head of communications. They anticipate it to be completed by December.
The website going down “is deeply problematic,” said City Councilmember Nina Ahmad, a member of the Education Committee. “This lack of information is very disempowering, and I think our constituents just feel like, what is going on?”
 

There’s a lot of work to be done on Guam Department of Education school facilities, but as of Thursday, depending on who you asked, some repair projects were still stuck between the governor’s office and the Office of the Attorney General.

"The refurbishment project seems to be in a critical phase, with essential documents currently under review by the attorney general and the governor. It's clear that the ongoing conflict and uncertainties are causing delays, which in turn affects the timeline of the project's completion,” GDOE Superintendent Kenneth Erik Swanson told The Guam Daily Post on Thursday.

GDOE is one of the agencies that has been caught in the middle of an ongoing dispute between the AG and the Office of the Governor over the AG’s duties as they pertain to legal representation of government agencies.

Denver’s Board of Education voted unanimously Thursday evening to pass a policy on school consolidation and closures, paving the way for Superintendent Alex Marrero to again recommend school closures to combat declining enrollment.

The policy comes as Denver Public Schools, the state’s largest district, projects 6,338 fewer children will attend its schools within the next five years, with K-12 enrollment expected to reach 69,819 pupils during the 2028-29 academic year, according to the presentation DPS officials gave the school board earlier in the week.

Marrero on Thursday referred to potential school closures as “right-sizing” the school district.

The school board’s policy sets guidelines for Marrero to use should he propose another round of school closures. The previous school board was reluctant to close schools when Marrero first suggested shuttering 10 schools almost two years ago, but eventually voted in 2023 to close three schools because of low enrollment.

Under the policy, schools of any size are eligible for consolidation or closure — not just those with low enrollment.

Voters in Warwick approved $350 million in bonds in 2022 to replace Toll Gate and Pilgrim High Schools, but rising construction costs are impacting the price tags.

"We have had to make some alterations so that way we can get those schools done within the $350 million price point," said Warwick School Committee Member Shaun Galligan. He added, "For Toll Gate, we had to change up the initial design to minimize the excavation costs, so we had to follow the lay of the land over on that side of the city."

In November of 2022, voters approved a bond measure to build two new high schools on the fields of the existing schools.

Since then, construction costs have spiked across the nation.

The USD 253 Board of Education approved an emergency maintenance purchase after a recent condenser failure at Logan Elementary during a meeting Wednesday evening.

Superintendent Allison Anderson-Harder said a twenty-ton condenser unit had multiple parts fail at Logan Avenue recently. As the condenser unit is over 30 years old, parts have become difficult and expensive to find, and in some cases, would have to be machined specifically for the application.

Replacing the condenser would include a 21-week lead time, meaning that the work would not be completed until October, long after the school year resumes in August. Instead, the board approved replacing the condenser and the air handler with heating capability while cutting the lead time down to under eleven weeks for $137,699

The members of the Guilford County Board of Education weren’t happy at all with the amount of money Guilford County Manager Mike Halford proposed for Guilford County Schools in his recommended 2024-2025 fiscal county budget.

 It was $47 million shy of what school officials had asked the county for, so, at a Tuesday, June 11 work session in the Old Guilford County Court House, school leaders explained to the commissioners why they needed more money for both ongoing operations and school maintenance.

Just last week, in a lengthy public hearing, school staff, students and school advocates made the case passionately to commissioners that the county’s school system needs more money – however, the cozier, more relaxed June 11 work session allowed school leaders their chance to make a final plea to the commissioners in an afternoon work session.

Usually, the school officials spend this final school/commissioner work session each year making their case for more money for school operations – and they did that this year too. They spoke of a need to increase salaries to retain teachers and also a need for more pay for “classified workers” such as bus drivers, cafeteria staff and janitors, among other operations’ needs.

Classes at a small West Virginia school will be relocated this fall, two years after the town's contaminated groundwater was added to a national cleanup priority list.

Wetzel County Schools Superintendent Cassandra R. Porter announced the move Tuesday for students, faculty and staff at Paden City High School. They will relocate to existing schools in nearby New Martinsville when classes resume in August.

“A safe learning environment for our students is fundamental and imperative,” Porter said in a letter to faculty and staff.

In March 2022, federal environmental officials placed Paden City’s groundwater on the list of Superfund cleanup sites. Untreated groundwater contained the solvent tetrachloroethylene at levels higher than the federally allowed limit.

Tetrachloroethylene is widely used by dry cleaners. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency said the contaminated area is around the site of a dry cleaner that closed more than two decades ago in the Ohio River town of about 2,500 residents.

According to the EPA, tetrachloroethylene is a likely carcinogen and can harm the nervous system, liver, kidneys and reproductive system.

When Thomas Pace, director of facilities at San Bernardino City Unified, thinks about all the construction that needs to happen at the schools in his district, he struggles to get the math to work.
Many of the existing kindergarten classrooms don’t meet state standards, and now, they’re preparing to layer in another grade for young children: transitional kindergarten.
In 2021, California embarked on a $2.7 billion plan to offer TK to all 4-year-olds by the 2025–26 school year in what’s poised to be the largest free pre-K program in the country.
But school districts across the state, like Pace’s, are struggling to build or modify the facilities most appropriate for these new young learners.
Why the rollout is expensive and hard
San Bernardino City Unified is at the tail end of using $250 million in bond money the city raised over a decade ago for school improvements.
“All of the specialized space is highly expensive, and for those school districts that lack the local resources, we struggle to make those improvements on a grand scale,” Pace said. “So we were already struggling to catch up even in the kinder realm. Now, you add in a greater offering for TK, it just puts a larger burden on local school districts.”
 

Anchorage School District officials and local elected leaders broke ground at Inlet View Elementary School on Monday before a crowd of dozens of teachers, students and neighbors.

A new school will be built over the next year and a half alongside the existing building in South Addition. Supporters of the project, including Inlet View parent and teacher Beth Daly-Gamble, say the upgrade is vital. The current school, built in 1957, is overcrowded and old.

“The rooms are small, we have tiles coming up from the floor all the time,” Daly-Gamble said. ”We call building maintenance probably every single day from things that are falling apart and our sewage backed up two years ago into the playground area, and sat like that for a while.”

The school also does not have a sprinkler system or a separate cafeteria. Students eating lunch share a room with other students taking gym class.

The new school will have more space.

WICHITA, Kan. (KWCH) - Kansas’ largest school district presented its blueprint for the future of its footprint. The “Facilities Master Plan” Wichita Public Schools presented to the school board Monday night calls for rebuilding, reconfiguring or consolidating about two dozen of the district’s buildings. It could also lead to a $450 million bond question going before voters.

Presented as a draft to Wichita school board members, step one of the Facilities Master Plan involves 25 of the district’s buildings, including school consolidations and rebuilds.

The plan calls for rebuilding eight school facilities, and consolidating four elementary schools, five alternative schools and two administrative centers,” Wichita Public Schools Superintendent Kelly Bielefeld explained.

School rebuilds and renovations will also be part of the plan to accommodate consolidations, the Wichita Public Schools superintendent said.

There are now 16 community gardens within Federal Way Public Schools, including Twin Lakes Elementary, which held its grand opening on June 1.

There were fun activities and resources as well as food, music and performances, and special guests — including representatives from Swansons plant nursery in Seattle and the Seahawks — to encourage engagement with and around the school garden.

This year, Twin Lakes staff Marina Rojas and Alysia Morales led efforts to organize and build a community garden for the school, securing over $10,000 in donated funds and materials to make it happen, according to the district. They partnered with the Seahawks, working with them in planning and reaching out to additional community partners, including Swansons Nursery in Seattle, which shared resources, funds, and donated labor.

The garden will be a center where Twin Lakes Elementary families and neighbors can have free access to fresh fruits and vegetables and build relationships with each other.

Marine Hills Garden Club also supported this garden.

“We really like the idea of growing gardeners,” Radhika Kumar of the Marine Hills Garden Club said of their work with the gardens at Federal Way Public Schools.

LOUISVILLE, Ky. (WAVE) - A skeleton of bare, rusted, steel remnants of an incomplete building stands as a symbol of economic failure in west Louisville.

Abandoned when Passport Health halted construction in 2019, the 20-acre property at the corner of 18th and West Broadway was also where Walmart abandoned plans to build in 2016.

Participant of this development Rubin Pulliam said it has long been a troubling sight and reminds him of lost jobs and opportunities.

“It’s been rough,” Pulliam said. “I hate to come by there now because of what it stood for, what we started out for, and we didn’t know if it was over. But we kept pushing, kept pushing.”

At  Baker Heights Elementary, everything seems to be coming apart, and it's Timothy Scott's job to try to patch whatever's broken — whether it be falling ceiling tiles or a water fountain falling off the wall.
"It could be fixed, it could be repaired, but we're pulling funding from the classroom," Scott said.
Baker, Louisiana, just outside Baton Rouge, is home to roughly 12,000 people. Money is tight, and the population and tax base are shrinking. The infrastructure, including five school buildings that were all built in the 1950s, is crumbling.
Across the U.S., the average public school building is now nearly half a century old, and communities like Baker are facing a lot of repairs. Although Congress allocated more than $1 trillion to rebuild America's infrastructure in 2021, many schools across the country are growing desperate to fund the much-needed repairs.
To date, the infrastructure law has funded more than 40,000 projects across the country. But in many cases, the money reaches communities like Baker too slowly.  
Baker Superintendent J.T. Stroder says declining enrollment means "it's tough to do anything." The problems with infrastructure are not limited to the city's schools, he says.
"You can drive around the community and you'll see how those kind of match," Stroder said.
"The way a student feels about their surroundings and their atmosphere affects how they perform academically," he added.
Overall, America's infrastructure — from roads to bridges to drinking water — has a grade of C-minus, according to the last "report card" from the American Society of Civil Engineers. The investment needed just to bring American schools up to par is $870 billion, according to the 21st Century School Fund.
 

Mayor Muriel Bowser (D) has officially accepted the recommendations in the 2023 Boundary and Student Assignment Study.
Any potential boundary modifications and feeder recommendations would take effect no sooner than the 2025-26 school year, i.e., August of 2025.
The Mayor’s letter was dated June 5.  Next, Deputy Mayor of Education (DME) and DC Public Schools (DCPS) will start formulating the implementation plan, which will be posted to the DME website sometime in August.
Many on the Hill may be wondering how that affects the most contentious issue proposed by the committee, the idea of pairing Miner Elementary (501 15th St. NE) with Maury Elementary (1250 Constitution Ave. NE).
Those recommendations include:
In schools where the percentage of at-risk student enrollment falls below the DCPS average (52 percent) lottery seats be set aside for students meeting at-risk criteria. These seats do not include PK seats except in situations where they are not typically filled by in-bounds students. The percentage is to be determined by the school and LEA.
Implement the at-risk set aside at Maury to help support socioeconomic integration at the school
DCPS explore the feasibility of pairing Maury and Miner Elementaries by launching a Maury-Miner Community Working Group no earlier than School Year 2026-27 to examine the feasibility of a pairing and, if so, determine the logistics of doing so.
 

On his last day of school, Liam McCarthy had to go home because the air conditioning at his Ada Merritt K-8 classroom was not working.

“It produces hotter air,” said Liam, a third grade student. “It feels like exhaust from a truck but then somebody breathing on your neck. And then the sun is on you.”

His mother, Robyn McCarthy, is livid over what she described as an ongoing issue that does not seem to have a resolution.

“I think it’s been an issue at the school for a pretty long time,” said Robyn McCarthy, who added the school’s air conditioning broke a couple times at the end of the school year last year.

As for this school year, Robyn McCarthy said: “I want to say it’s broken nine times in the past six or seven weeks and it broke today on the last day of school.”

Robyn McCarthy and other parents have been told a fix is coming and the budget has been approved for a new air conditioning.

“Mostly I’m worried about the staff, I’m worried about the teachers. I’m worried about the students because they can’t learn when they’re uncomfortable because it’s been brutal,” she said.

The Lake Osewego school district in Oregon is no stranger to climate crises and their impact on students, families, and the broader community.

After years of close encounters with extreme weather and wildfires, as well as the constant threat of earthquakes in the Pacific Northwest, the district south of Portland rebuilt one of its elementary schools in the hopes of never again being caught flat-footed.

The 79,000-square-foot facility can accommodate 600 students. But what sets it apart is that it’s specially designed to withstand the compounding and often difficult-to-predict fallout of climate change, which the community has experienced over and over in recent years.

It is believed to be one of first K-12 schools in America to get its energy from a microgrid—a self-sufficient energy system that can operate independently from the area’s electric grid, supplied in part by an onsite solar panel array. The setup means the school’s power can stay on, even when the rest of surrounding area goes dark. That could translate to fewer emergency school closures as the building is able to maintain power and heating and cooling systems. And it’s part of what makes the school suitable as an emergency shelter for the community during natural catastrophes.

Local school funding disparities are not unique to Arizona, but in recent years, approaching the issue by suing a state is.

Recent research by Bellwether found wealthy districts in 123 large metro areas across 38 states often had much more local funding per student than less-affluent districts as a result of economic segregation. In order to close the state and local funding gap within these metro area districts, $26 billion in additional state funding is needed on an annual basis, the study said.

Bellwether researchers also suggested updating state formulas that include a generous allocation for students in poverty and those needing learning interventions.

Arizona ranked 50th in overall education spending and last in funding education as of September 2023, according to the Education Data Initiative, a team of data researchers who analyze figures on the U.S. education system. During that same period, Arizona’s schools spent $9,070 per pupil for a total of $10.3 billion annually. By comparison, the national average on spending per pupil was $16,080.