The process of changing school boundaries for DC Public Schools (DCPS) is underway. The 2023 Boundary and Student Assignment Study, or Boundary Study, reviews boundaries and feeder patterns and District-wide public school student assignment policies and makes recommendations to the mayor for changes. Recommendations are due to be submitted to Mayor Muriel Bowser (D) no later than February 2024.

The study was launched in March through the Office of the Deputy Mayor for Education (DME). It is the first update to school by-right attendance boundaries since 2013-2014, when DC undertook its first comprehensive review of boundaries in 40 years.

DME is running a Master Facilities Plan (MFP) study at the same time and the two have some overlap in the review of  building condition, resources and utilization. Any potential boundary modifications and feeder recommendations would take effect no sooner than the 2025-26 school year, i.e., August of 2025.

“We are embarking on a city-wide planning process that will provide strategic, data-informed recommendations to ensure more students have access to great schools and facilities that meet their needs,” said Deputy Mayor for Education Paul Kihn.

GRANDVILLE, MI – Seventh and eighth graders at Grandville Public Schools will be walking into a brand new middle school when they return for the new school year on Monday.
The new $57 million Grandville Middle School building, unveiled by district leaders on Tuesday, Aug. 15, features 200,000 square feet of teaching and open learning spaces, a state-of-the-art robotics competition center, STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) facilities, and fitness spaces for community use.
The new middle school, located at 4900 Canal Ave. SW behind the high school, will serve students in grades 7 and 8. The school is expected to have around 850 students enrolled this fall, with capacity to hold 1,000 students if enrollment grows, Superintendent Roger Bearup said.
A $94 million bond proposal approved by Grandville voters in 2019 supported the construction of the new middle school, which was intended to help address capacity issues in the district’s elementary school buildings by creating more space at the intermediate level.
 

Air conditioning outages continued to plague Fort Worth public schools Tuesday, as maintenance crews scrambled to repair the aging systems straining under a relentless heat wave.
Nearly 100 classrooms at 25 campuses reported problems Monday, the first day of the school year. In a statement, Fort Worth ISD said affected students and staff were moved to areas within school buildings with working air conditioning units.
“We want to assure you that we are treating this matter with the utmost urgency,” the statement said. “We want to emphasize that the well-being of our students and staff is our primary concern.”
North Texas has recorded 36 days of at least 100 degrees, more than a typical summer, which sees roughly 20 days with 100-degree temperatures.
 

JACKSON, Miss., Aug. 14, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- The Educational Facilities Revolving Loan Fund (EFRLF) is a new initiative passed by the Mississippi Legislature designed to support public education infrastructure. Specifically, the program makes funds available for school districts to pay down district debt, repair or renovate buildings, or build new Pre-Kindergarten or Career and Technical Education Centers across the state.

State leaders provided an initial allocation of $40 million to establish the EFRLF as an evergreen fund, meaning districts receiving these funds pay it back over ten equal annual installments at 0% interest. This money is in turn loaned out again each year providing a perpetual funding source for schools.

Through this program, 61 local education agencies have been awarded financial support offered by the Revolving Loan Fund. In its inaugural year, funds have been awarded to a diverse range of districts across Mississippi, fostering an equitable approach to educational development. Examples of how the funds are being used include emergency road repairs, roof replacements, building new Pre-Kindergarten centers, and fixing bathrooms.

If you are from Idaho, you are probably aware of our deepening struggle with school facilities and determining a path forward. The historic growth of our state has only increased the demand on our classrooms.
This is an issue I often hear about from parents and teachers. As a former school board member of Idaho Falls School District 91, growth, aging facilities, and property taxes were issues we wrestled with on a regular basis. Now as a state senator and chairman of the Senate Education Committee, I am committed to bring solutions to these longstanding issues. My objective is to provide a path forward for school facilities while decreasing the reliance on local school-related property taxes.
The issue is not as simple as it may seem.
As our school facilities age, parents and teachers become frustrated by their condition and functionality. The Idaho Legislature has a constitutional responsibility to provide adequate facilities that provide a safe and productive learning environment for our students.
 

ESCAMBIA COUNTY, Fla. -- The Escambia County School District has been making renovations to a number of its schools since the end of last school year.
With classes set to start back Thursday, maintenance crews were putting some eleventh hour finishing touches on various projects before the doors open.
The Escambia County School District director of facilities planning says these improvements were needed and there's more to come.
School officials tell WEAR News, renovations during summer break totaled about $22 million.
"We have a considerable amount of federal funding that we're using to replace air conditioning and exterior envelopes -- windows specifically," Director of Facilities Planning Keith Wasdin said.
Wasdin says the money came from emergency relief funds designed for elementary and secondary schools. He says sales tax money is also being used to help fund the renovations.
 

In 2021, Winona Area Public Schools’ (WAPS) architect identified about $63 million in deferred maintenance needs at local schools. The district’s $94 million referendum this April aimed to address some of that deferred maintenance, as well as remodel and upgrade facilities, but that referendum did not pass. While some citizens have expressed concern about the substantial amount of deferred maintenance the district has left unaddressed, others have argued that the district does not receive enough funding to complete all deferred maintenance projects.

SANTA FE, N.M.— Environmental, public health and social justice groups today urged New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham to establish statewide health buffer zones to prohibit oil and gas wells within one mile of schools and other educational facilities.

In June state Land Commissioner Stephanie Garcia Richard introduced a ban on new oil and gas leasing on state lands within a mile of schools, but no policy exists to protect children from wells on other lands. Today’s letter asks the governor to use her executive authority to ban new wells within a mile of schools across New Mexico and phase out existing wells within that health zone by 2026.

“It’s critical to protect our children and grandchildren from toxic oil and gas emissions,” said Daniel Tso, former council delegate of the Navajo Nation Council. “I’ve seen an increase in respiratory illnesses among Navajo students who attend Lybrook Elementary School, which is surrounded by oil and gas wells. They don’t deserve to be poisoned when they go to school.”

Anyone wishing to understand the challenges facing Kansas and its sister plains states should spend time in an abandoned schoolyard.

Study the boarded-up structures; touch the rusty slipper-slide; nudge the squeaky merry-go-round. An instinctive feel will emerge for the dreams of communities past, and with it, a sense of how depopulation and school consolidation have accompanied Kansans on their walks through history.

Kansas Reflector has reported on the vote by Barton County residents to dissolve their school district, as some residents of Wilson react in protest to the proposed closing of their high school. In the early 1900s, Kansas had more than 8,000 organized districts, most of them serving one-room schools. During the 1940s baby boom, the number of Kansas children aged 13 and younger shot up almost 80 percent. Facing population pressure, administrators argued that larger and fewer districts produced lower costs of scale, allowing the fixed expenses of maintaining schools to be spread across more students.

The state legislature responded in 1945 by adopting statewide educational standards. This had far-reaching consequences for both rural and urban areas.

In Topeka, plaintiffs in the Brown v. Board of Education case argued that segregation caused Black schools to fall short of the equality standard set by the state government, opening the door to a successful U.S. Supreme Court ruling, and arguably, the next phase of a civil rights movement. In farm country, educators claimed that rural schools suffered from poorly trained teachers, bad attendance, and lack of extracurricular activities like music and sports, which prepared children socially for modern life.

By 1950, when a whopping one-fourth of all Kansans were of school age, the number of school districts had been reduced to half of what they had been a generation earlier. One- and two-room rural schools were phased out, replaced by town schools answerable more to distant bureaucracies than locally elected officials.

Nearly 64 million people in the United States currently live in counties that have been flagged by the American Lung Association for having spikes in deadly particle pollution on a daily basis. And studies show that children are at disproportionately high risk.

Exposure to tiny airborne particles from wildfires, an increasingly common occurrence of late, is about 10 times as harmful to children’s respiratory health as pollution from other sources. Children also are more vulnerable than other populations to excessive heat, another growing climate-related concern. Those surging health risks put an extra burden on schools to ensure that children are safe and comfortable enough to learn while they’re on campus.

“The wildfire smoke, the heat, the drought, flooding—all the impacts of climate change are here,” said Jonathan Klein, co-founder of Undaunted, a national nonprofit that advocates for solutions to fight climate change. “Schools are where students spend more of their waking hours than anywhere else. We need to make sure they’re resilient and prepared for extreme weather events.”

Right now, countless numbers of schools aren’t, say environmental experts. When the air quality gets too bad or temperatures soar, schools often respond by closing or sending kids home early. When schools are open, aging infrastructures, too few school nurses, and a lack of alternative recess space further challenge their ability to safeguard kids’ health and well-being in the face of increasingly extreme and frequent weather events.

Schools investing in campus upgrades are putting more emphasis on spaces that encourage student engagement, allow flexibility for changing enrollments, and ensure student and staff safety, according to experts in school architecture.

Before new spaces are built or existing areas reconfigured, however, there’s a lot of planning between school officials and designers about how best to maximize a district’s desires with what is practically and financially possible.

″​​It was with that kind of question that we pulled together diverse thought leaders … to come together and kind of try to answer this question of what is the school of the future,” said Melissa Turnbaugh, a board member of the Learning Environments Action Research Network, or LEARN, and partner at PBK, a K-12 and higher education school design firm. LEARN, a new nonprofit organization, is a collaboration of education design experts, district officials and others working to promote safety, access, innovation, health and sustainability in schools.

(The Center Square) – The Detroit Public Schools were to receive an update Tuesday at its regular board meeting on a $2.1 billion plan to upgrade its infrastructure with the use of federal COVID-19 money.

The district has transferred $135.9 million of the budgeted $343.6 million in federal pandemic relief money that it has planned in 2023, according to a budget document included on the agenda. The district is spending almost 80% of its federal COVID-19 money in 2023 on its facility plan.

Detroit is expected to spend $1.2 billion updating its public school facilities over the next 20 years. The plan includes improving the overall condition of schools through some new school buildings and renovations focused on heating, ventilation, and air conditioning, roofs and masonry. 

According to WGHP-TV, 500 elementary school students in Burlington, North Carolina, might be displaced at the start of the school year due to a severe mold infestation that could cost the Alamance-Burlington School System (ABSS) at least US$700,000.

In July, the summer cleaning crew at Andrews Elementary School made the discovery of mold on desks, tables, and chairs, as well as around return vents and doors within the school. According to WGHP, a leaky air conditioning unit, combine with this summer’s severe heat, created the mold problem.

“The engineers did explain today that, fortunately, we do not have what’s called toxigenic type molds in the building, and it’s really room specific,” Les Atkins, ABSS public information officer, told WGHP. “So, it’s not like the entire building is mold infested.” However, no teachers or administrators are currently being allowed inside the school building.

The ABSS school year starts for students on August 28, with teachers needing to return in less than two weeks on August 18, WGHP reports. At a recent meeting to address the problem, the school board immediately approved taking action to mitigate the mold, but whether the work can be done in time for the start of the school year is still in question.

“Just so our families know, we do have a plan in place to relocate students to other facilities, should we need to do that,” Atkins said.

Mold and other types of fungi are increasingly becoming a problem on a worldwide scale. Check out Is Fungus the Cleaning Industry’s Next Biggest Challenge? to learn more.

SOMERVILLE, Mass. —
A Somerville school that was in the process of being structurally assessed is now closed after asbestos was found inside the building, according to officials in the Massachusetts city.

A city spokesperson said that on Monday, a consultant helping with an additional building assessment of the Winter Hill Community Innovation School informed Somerville officials of the unexpected presence of asbestos in material that is not typically found to contain asbestos. City officials then immediately informed Somerville Public Schools officials of the findings.

Somerville officials have closed the Winter Hill School, which has not held classes since early June, and it will remain closed to all until further notice while the findings are investigated, and the material is remediated, according to the city spokesperson.

ROANOKE, Va. (WDBJ) - Roanoke City officials are preparing for the start of the new school year. During a joint meeting between Roanoke City Public Schools and the city council - a new budget work group was created, updates were given on new construction projects, and the superintendent was recognized.
Despite delaying the opening of the new technical education center – Roanoke City Public Schools officials found a solution. Students will be able to start their programs at the start of the new school year.
“This is legacy work,” said Superintendent Verletta White.
White is following through on her promises made under the Equity in Action Project.
“We believe that this is really important to build trust in our community,” explained White.
One of those promises is the new technical education center. The building will accommodate all existing programs and add 4 new ones, including criminal justice, landscaping, barber classes, and an HVAC program.
“Our community has asked for these programs since my first day on the job,” added White.
The new center gives students more options to pursue other avenues after graduating.
 

A long-standing effort to provide low-income schools with federal grants to improve building infrastructure and internet connectivity has been reintroduced in Congress by Democratic U.S. lawmakers with support from Maryland Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D), and others.

According to a Monday press release, the “Rebuild America’s Schools Act” would establish a $100 billion federal grant program and a $30 billion tax credit bond program for high-poverty schools to fund physical and digital infrastructure improvements.

Van Hollen has been a supporter and cosponsor of the initiative when the bill was first introduced in 2019, and then again in 2021. But neither of those previous efforts were successful.

“We must ensure that our students and educators have modern school buildings and facilities that support their success rather than rundown infrastructure that hinders progress,” Van Hollen said in a written statement.

“This legislation will help bring our schools and classrooms into the 21st century, ensuring that they don’t stand in the way of our children’s opportunity to receive a quality education,” he added.

The School District of Philadelphia will begin developing a “master plan” to deal with its aging school facilities, something city officials have been asking for since at least March. 
That’s what Superintendent Tony Watlington promised City Council’s Committee on Education during a Wednesday hearing exploring the option of creating an “independent school building authority.”
This “independent authority” would bond and oversee school buildings. It’s a pressing topic, as damaged asbestos caused several schools to close during the 2022-23 year.
It’s also a somewhat contentious idea. In May, Philadelphia Board of Education President Reginald Streater asserted that increasing funding should be a priority, not creating a new entity.
Councilmember Isaiah Thomas, chair of the education committee, called for the hearings in April, citing the district’s apparent inability to handle its facility needs. If created, the independent authority would supervise building repairs and construction projects.
“The state of our school buildings is an emergency,” Thomas told Billy Penn. “The creation of an independent authority could help relieve the burden on the School District of maintaining facilities and in turn improve learning outcomes.”
 

Millions of children are heading to school in August during the worst heat wave in recorded human history.
Children in Atlanta and San Bernardino, California, kicked off their school year this week in temperatures well above 90 degrees Fahrenheit (32 degrees Celsius).
“We start to get into really dangerous territory when the heat index is greater than 90 degrees, because that’s a significant health threat for heatstroke and heat illness,” said pediatrician Dr. Lisa Patel, a clinical associate professor of pediatrics at Stanford Medicine Children’s Health in California.
Many children in Phoenix and other cities in Maricopa County, Arizona, have started school despite recent temperatures up to 110 F (43 C) — so hot that people have gotten serious, even life-threatening burns from simply falling on the ground, as previously reported by CNN.
And children in New Orleans and Baton Rouge, Louisiana, are also heading to class next week with forecasted highs around 100 F (37.8 C) and a heat index of 110 — which is what the heat feels like on the body.
“Keep in mind, this summer might be the coolest one for the rest of our lives as global warming intensifies,” said Patel, who also serves as executive director of the Medical Society Consortium on Climate and Health.
 

With trees to climb, prairie grass to run through and boulders to jump off, the new playground at Colene Hoose Elementary School in Normal, Illinois, isn’t slated to be your normal schoolyard.
“There’s an archetype in our heads when we think of a playground,” says Adam Bienenstock, whose company, Bienenstock Natural Playgrounds, built the school’s new outdoor space. “The difference between this place is that every aspect of this space is a place for kids to play.”
For years, many U.S. schoolyards have been asphalt- or cement-covered spaces devoid of trees and greenery. But as temperatures increase and climate change-fueled heat waves become more frequent, people in a growing number of U.S. communities – including Normal, Los Angeles, New York City and elsewhere – are rethinking what these outdoor spaces look like, working to make them more nature-friendly and resilient, yet also engaging for children.
Instead of blacktop, steel, rubber and plastic, schools and their partners are installing trees and other greenery, boulders, decomposed granite, and structures made out of natural materials like wood and rope.
“We’ve taken measurements where the air temperature is 67 degrees and the black rubber was 162 degrees,” says Sharon Danks, CEO and founder of Green Schoolyards America, a nonprofit that works to create environmentally friendly schoolyards and collaborated on the Colene Hoose Elementary School project.
 

BROOKLYN, Ohio -- For more than a year, the Brooklyn City School District has been focusing on facility upgrades.
That conversation took a step forward this week when the Board of Education agreed to explore placing a bond issue on the March 2024 ballot.
“Obviously, with the age of our high school being built around 1957, we’re getting to a point where we need to really start looking at capital projects and how can we upgrade and renovate some of our facilities,” Superintendent/CEO Theodore Caleris said.
“This has been an ongoing conversation.”
What’s being proposed is a 2.14-mill bond issue that, if approved, would raise $15 million while costing the owner of a home valued at $100,000 an additional $74.90 annually.
While the exact renovations haven’t been decided, the superintendent said the plan involves the auditorium and the main gymnasium at the high school complex, as well as the athletic complex at Hurricane Alley.