Pender County officials gathered this week to kick off the start of construction for the school district's newest K-8 school.

The new school is designed to accommodate the district's increasing student population and went through a significant redesign earlier in the year, according to a press release from the district. The redesign added an additional 24,000 square feet of classroom space by incorporating a second story on the middle school wing. This will enable the school to accommodate 312 more students, bringing the total school capacity to 2,312.

"Today's groundbreaking is a testament to our district's commitment to providing exceptional educational facilities that meet the evolving needs of our community," Superintendent Brad Breedlove said, according to the release. "The expanded capacity of this new K-8 school will ensure that our students have access to the resources and space they need to thrive academically and socially."

When Philadelphia student Chelsea Mungo wrote to her state senators pleading for renovations for her rodent-infested, century-old elementary school, she never imagined she would one day receive thunderous applause while cutting the ribbon on a $62 million building.

“I’m just so happy right now,” Mungo said at last week’s official opening of the new Lewis C. Cassidy Academics Plus School in West Philadelphia’s Overbook neighborhood.

The old Lewis C. Cassidy building — the one Mungo told her elected officials in 2017 felt like “prison” — was crumbling. The new version, ready for students to start on Aug. 26, would fit in on Google’s campus. The walls are almost blindingly white. The classroom seating is modular and adjustable for even the wiggliest students. There’s a new playground, a sensory room for pre-kindergartners, a “maker’s space,” and an innovation lab.

“Success Starts Here” is emblazoned in the front entryway, in a font bigger than many of the school’s youngest students.

Following a consequential school board decision in late May, the closure of Fort Worth ISD’s Daggett Middle School is no longer on the table. 

Now, the district is instead weighing two options for families in the Paschal High School pyramid: consolidate the McLean 6th Grade and McLean Middle School campuses while renovating the middle school or upgrade the existing campuses as approved by voters in the district’s $1.2 billion 2021 bond election.

During an Aug. 19 community meeting held at McLean Middle School, district officials presented these options, emphasizing a commitment to enhance educational quality while addressing the logistical challenges of merging schools if the consolidation is approved.

The Fort Worth ISD school board will vote on the potential consolidation and closure of McLean 6th Grade during its Aug. 27 meeting, trustee Anne Darr told the Report after the meeting.

On Monday, J.P. Lord School stood empty once again after it dismissed students early Thursday when staff found mold in the building.
The school serves students who are handicapped or have complex and chronic medical conditions.
Omaha Public Schools COO Charles Wakefield said it was on equipment that they stored over the summer.
“As staff went to pull out that equipment to start the school year, that’s when they saw the mold,” Wakefield said.
Officials identified the mold as cladosporium, which can cause allergies.
While there is no federal threshold for airborne mold levels, the Douglas County Health Department said it can be harmful.
“Out of the abundance of caution for our kids, especially students who attend J.L. Lord with their needs, we did send students home,” Wakefield said.
They believe they have it all cleaned up now, but they’re testing just to make sure.
 

CLINTON, Tenn. (WATE) — At schools across East Tennessee, the books are organized on the shelves, the walls and lockers decorated, and even the playdough is out and ready to be molded by the youngest of students.
“To educate a student you have to have a great environment. If the environment is not good, then there is a problem,” said Director of Anderson County Schools Dr. Tim Parrott.
For nine years, Parrott has overseen a number of projects with Anderson County Schools. One of which, keeping the county’s 18 facilities up and running.
“We do a lot of stuff in house,” said Parrott. “We have our own heat and air, our own electrician. We have our own plumbers and everything like that. So, a lot of it is done in house.”
This past spring, health inspectors graded 11 of Anderson County’s 18 schools. Nine of the eleven graded out with a score of 99 or better.
“Bottom line is, we’ve got good facilities. Climate control and all the things like that to make sure that the environment is conducive to teaching.”
 

SAN PABLO, Calif. - It’s a day of celebration for one community in the West Contra Costa School District. Lake Elementary School, which was almost closed a decade ago, has been rebuilt, and part of the new campus opened today.
The first day of school in the West Contra Costa Unified School District isn't until Monday, but dozens of parents, teachers, and students gathered today to celebrate the campus reopening. 
The original Lake Elementary opened in 1957. In 2009, district budget issues nearly led to its closure, but parents and teachers stepped in to save it.
"Patricia was at the forefront of parents and teachers telling the school district to find the money," said Kristen Jones, a West Contra Costa Unified School District teacher who used to teach third grade at Lake Elementary. 
Her friend, Patricia Ponce had three kids at Lake Elementary at the time when she led the community-wide effort to challenge the school board and district and keep the school open. 
 

When Lois Brink’s kids were in elementary school, she remembers being struck by how uninviting their schoolyard was. She described it as “scorched earth” — little more than a dirt field coated in “I don’t know how many decades of weed retardant” and some aging play equipment. But Brink, a landscape architect and professor at the University of Colorado Denver, didn’t just see a problem. She saw fertile ground for a solution. Over the next dozen years, she helped lead a transformation of nearly 100 elementary school grounds across Denver into more vibrant, greener spaces, dubbed “Learning Landscapes.”

Public schools alone cover about 2 million acres of land in the U.S. Although comprehensive data is hard to come by, the “scorched earth” that Brink witnessed is the norm in many places — according to the Trust for Public Land, around 36 percent of the nation’s public school students attend school in what would be considered a heat island. And as with green spaces writ large, a dearth of schoolyard trees and other vegetation tends to be most common in lower-income areas and Black and brown neighborhoods.

JONESBORO — During a recent public hearing about the Clayton County Board of Education millage rate, a local substitute teacher spoke before the board not only about the tax rate but about some school facilities being in disrepair.
“Being a substitute teacher in Clayton County, I have noticed that there are a lot of things that go unrepaired in our schools,” Shawana Jackson said during a July 29 public hearing.
She told school board members some of the maintenance issues included mold, carpet, pests and roof leaks.
“Nothing is being done,” she said.
In an email to the Clayton News, school system leaders and others, Jackson specifically cited problems at Callaway Elementary, Kemp Primary, Suder Elementary and Tara Elementary.
“My concern is for our children,” she said at the July 29 meeting.
In a July 29 work session, school board Chair Jessie Goree said she had also been made aware of a flooding issue at the Professional Learning Center and there were carpet issues at the Performing Arts Center. She added that there needs to be some renovations at the PAC, including lighting and sound.
 

ORANGEBURG, S.C. — Orangeburg County School District was awarded $40 million dollars from the South Carolina Department of Education to build a new Robert E. Howard Elementary School.
The current Robert E. Howard Middle School will be demolished and replaced with a new, state-of-the-art elementary school that will be filled with students from Brookdale, Mellichamp and Whittaker elementary schools.
Orangeburg County School District Superintendent Shawn Foster says population decline plays a role in the consolidation of three elementary schools.
“Orangeburg County had upwards of 19,000 students. We’ve seen that steady decline down to little over 10,000, so with the change in populations, we have to make the tough decisions to make sure we’re most effectively using tax payers dollars but also keeping up with the educational needs and the infrastructure needs to ensure our kids receive a high quality educational experience,” Foster said.
Atiqua Brooks is a mom of a student who goes to Brookdale Elementary. She says they are excited for the new school.
 

The vast majority of school safety plans require administrators to lock exterior doors and limit building access, through protocols like ID checks for visitors.
In Texas, teams of inspectors visit every campus to make sure schools actually practice what they preach.
In unannounced visits, unarmed state employees conduct intruder audits to see if they can get into school buildings and, if they can, how long it takes to do so.
In sometimes divisive debates over school safety, limiting building access is one of the most commonly agreed upon strategies. But all it takes is a few bad habits—propping open a door during recess or waving a visitor past an ID check—for the most well-intentioned plans to fail, said Amy Klinger, co-founder of the Educator’s School Safety Network, an organization that consults with schools on safety plans.
“There is great value in having a fresh set of eyes look at your school,” said Klinger, who contracts with districts in other parts of the country to conduct vulnerability audits that included unannounced intruder tests. “We have to be careful that it doesn’t devolve into a ‘gotcha,’ but instead it’s being used as a mechanism for improvement.”
 

SAN ANTONIO - The San Antonio Independent School District says it only experienced minor air conditioning problems as classes got underway this week. Heating and cooling failures caused school closures and resignations at the district last year. The News 4 I-Team has uncovered the district still hasn't resolved a maintenance backlog that was a major factor behind the outages.
The I-Team requested records showing SAISD still has a total of 4,765 open work orders for buildings across the district. Of those, 1,725 are for heating and cooling equipment that needs repair. 1,081 are for plumbing problems at schools and support buildings.
As parents and students returned to Highland Hills Elementary Tuesday they were reminded of the AC problems last school year.
“Quite a few times they sent the kids home from school because it was hot and at meet the teacher everybody was dripping sweat really bad,” said parent Corina Hernandez.
 

WILKES-BARRE, LUZERNE COUNTY(WOLF) — The discovery of lead contamination was reported to the Hanover Area School District while they were in the process of removing existing paint. Dust containing lead migrated into areas of the bleacher system.

Superintendent Nathan Barret informed the community they found lead contamination during a scheduled renovation project to repaint the home bleachers at the Hanover Area School’s Memorial Stadium.

“We knew there was lead paint in there. There was lead paint remediation scheduled for it. As the process was going through there was a slight compromise in one of the ceiling vents that contaminated a storage area we hadn’t anticipated,” saidBarret.

No one is in immediate danger, but the project has to be cleaned up by an environmental scientist at this point. This will delay the different stages of the project to about 4-6 weeks.

Now, the athletes are in jeopardy of playing on the football field.

Four San Antonio Independent School District schools shuttered over the summer are already being reopened as “swing campuses” where students will be transported in the event temperatures become too hot at their home campuses.

The contingency is one of three developed in response to aging HVAC infrastructure, which buckled during a winter freeze in January, prompting a facilities assessment and overhaul of the district’s operations department.

As part of that overhaul, the district created a dashboard, where conditions can be monitored by district staff in realtime. It’s color-coded based on conditions with green for fully operational and red for ongoing issues.

A flurry of activity has been under way this summer at buildings around the Lincoln County School District School.

The Lincoln County Leader reached out for specific information about the nearly $1.5 million in projects and received the following details from the LCSD Facilities Director Rich Belloni, Business Services Director Kim Cusick, and Superintendent Dr. Majalise Tolan.

Oceanlake Elementary School — creating a new entrance to the student drop-off and pick-up driveway on 21st Street, allowing two lanes of traffic in the off-street parking/drop-off area. This should alleviate traffic congestion around the school during drop-off and pick-up times. This is being done in conjunction with Lincoln City’s grant project to add sidewalks along 21st Street. Also, two classrooms received new flooring, and asbestos tile was abated in those classrooms.

The Tuscaloosa County Schools system is working to get rid of mold in one of the district's elementary schools.
A statement was sent out to Englewood Elementary parents explaining that the lunchroom seating area would be renovated.
The district said moisture was found in the seating area about a week ago, but it is not a health or safety risk to students or staff.
Englewood elementary students are spending their lunch hour in the classrooms with grab and go style lunches.
"A plan had to made quickly to get the food to the kids and kind of redo the logistics of how kids were going to eat in the school, while this renovation is done to remedy this situation in that area," said Tuscaloosa County school system rep Terri Brewer.
 

When the air conditioning broke in a Terrebonne Parish school, it sometimes got so hot that kids fainted or had asthma attacks, and the school had to call an ambulance.
More often, the school sent kids home early. In the best-case scenario, students packed into classrooms with working AC or relocated to the gym or cafeteria to escape the southeast Louisiana heat.
So when the school district got its final federal COVID-19 relief package in 2021, school officials made fixing the AC a top priority. Nearly $23 million — more than 40% of the district's aid allotment — went to replace the most dire HVAC systems in seven schools.
"It gives us the confidence that we're not going to have to cancel school, the kids are not going to get sick," Superintendent Bubba Orgeron said. "When it's either too hot or too cold … kids are focused on that instead of learning."
Handed billions of dollars with few strings attached, thousands of school leaders made a similar calculation that year. Across 21 states with publicly available data, schools on average planned to spend 18% of their third and largest COVID-19 aid package on facilities, a Chalkbeat analysis found. That's nearly as much as they were required to spend on academic recovery.
In Mississippi, schools put nearly 40% of their final aid package toward buildings. In South Dakota, it was more than half.
As the nation takes stock of its return on this massive one-time investment, many school leaders stand behind their decision to go big on facilities, and say this will pay dividends for academics and student engagement. A growing body of research suggests a child's learning environment affects their test scores and attendance.
But recent research points to a potentially troubling trend: High-poverty districts, like Terrebonne Parish, were more likely to budget a greater share of their final aid package for facilities and operations, especially costly projects like new construction and building repairs. That left them less to spend on academic recovery — even though they educate the kids who've had the most academic ground to make up.
 

SPRING VALLEY, N.Y. — When the state of New York became the first in the nation to require all public schools to test their drinking water for lead in 2016, Keyry Broncano learned that water drawn from 68 different taps at her high school contained dangerously high lead levels.
Then Broncano, at the time a high school junior, discovered that the water she’d been drinking since kindergarten in the East Ramapo Central School District, about an hour north of New York City, probably contained elevated lead levels: Water from 23 taps at her elementary school was found to contain at least 15 parts per billion of lead. At her middle school, 85 taps had high lead levels.
“I was like, ‘I think I’ve been drinking poison,’” Broncano said, recalling rushing home to explain the news to her mother, a Guatemalan immigrant.
It’s an experience that has been repeated in schools across the country since 2014, when a crisis involving lead in the water in Flint, Mich., prompted some states to adopt new testing requirements for schools and day-care centers.
Whenever states, counties or school districts have decided to test the water in their schools, lead has often been discovered.
 

GRANGEVILLE — “I’m impressed with the upkeep of your district’s buildings and the proactive stance Ty [Reuter] and the maintenance crew, the board, the district as a whole has done to keep things upgraded and maintained,” Richard Bauscher told the Mountain View School District 244 board of trustees.

Bauscher is a retired Middleton superintendent and current clinical associate professor at the University of Idaho. He is a facilities planner consultant who assesses and appraises school buildings and provides numbers of what it would cost to “make them whole.”

Bauscher’s survey of the school’s buildings came as a caveat to receiving upcoming state money (see sidebar), in that districts receiving the funds must produce a 10-year plan to the State Department of Education. Bauscher had already provided 35 district reports in the state.

It seems like school starts earlier every year — many kids across Arizona are already in back-to-school mode now, at the very beginning of August. And it’s hot — much hotter than summers past, with records being broken each year.

So, how are Arizona schools keeping kids cool — on buses and in classrooms in the hottest parts of the state?

To find out, The Show spoke to Cole Young, superintendent of the Mohave Valley School District — a rural district northwest of the Valley, not far from Needles, California — which just broke Phoenix’s record for the hottest monthly temperature in a U.S. city this July.

Full conversation
COLE YOUNG: So we're kind of in the tri-city area when it comes to Needles and Laughlin, Bullhead City. And we're just 17 miles south of Bullhead City. So Death Valley is only two hours away. We've got about 400 kids. We're a K-8 school district.

LAUREN GILGER: You mentioned you're not far from Death Valley. So we should not assume that because you're a little further north than us in the state of Arizona that it is not very hot there, I'm assuming.

YOUNG: It is. Yeah, we, we get plenty of heat. When we have a day that's under 100, we think it's a very cool day, maybe time for a shawl or something.

SPRINGFIELD – Following growing concerns within the 30th District about the health impacts of poor air quality, State Senator Adriane Johnson championed a vital new law that addresses and improves air quality in elementary and secondary schools.

“This law will have a significant impact on students with asthma and allergies by ensuring schools are equipped with the best resources and practices to maintain clean air,” said Johnson (D- Buffalo Grove). “This is a critical step in reducing health disparities and providing a safer, healthier environment for students, faculty and staff.”

Johnson’s law tasks the Illinois State Board of Education, in consultation with the Illinois Department of Public Health, to compile resources to assess air quality and maintain ventilation systems in schools. ISBE will implement outreach strategies to make these resources available to elementary and secondary schools within 30 days of compilation, with updates as necessary.