The last of Ohio County Schools' three construction projects, totaling $11 million, should be complete by this summer, according to Seth Southard, district superintendent.

The projects included an addition at Wayland Elementary School that was finished in August. The addition has four classrooms, two for both preschool and kindergarten. The total cost of the Wayland addition was $1.5 million.

When Wayland was built in 1996, the district opted to keep the Wayland Preschool at its former location, at 110 Frederica St. in Hartford. The former Wayland school became the Render Education Center, which is where the district's alternative learning and day treatment programs are located. The Cliff Hagan Boys and Girls Club of Ohio County Extension also operates from the facility.

Southard said having the Wayland preschool a part of the elementary has provided a "more fluid transition" for preschool students and staff members. At its former location, students had to walk outside the building and into the Render Center to have meals. Having the preschool in-house at the elementary has been better for students.

FARMINGTON -- The Farmington School Board and school administrators gathered April 8 with school staff and those from the community to celebrate the groundbreaking of the district's new solar arrays.
Located adjacent to Farmington High School on Arkansas 170, the 499-kilowatt array is one of three arrays that will help the district accomplish its goals to operate sustainably and create savings for salary initiatives.
Another array is under construction behind Williams Elementary in Farmington and the third array is part of a 100-acre cooperative installation in Booneville that will serve the city of Booneville and the Farmington and Fayetteville school districts, according to Adam Ness, chief of staff with Entegrity.
In 2021, the Farmington School District partnered with the Arkansas Energy Office to implement an energy savings performance contract, wherein a state-approved company implements energy-efficient upgrades that pay for themselves. The School Board chose Entegrity to audit their facilities and implement a tailored scope of work to include LED lighting, solar energy installations, water conservation measures, new HVAC equipment, HVAC tune-ups, controls upgrades and emergency power generation.
Currently halfway through completion, the project is guaranteed by Entegrity to produce savings of nearly $300,000 annually and more than $6 million over the project's lifetime.
Superintendent Jon Laffoon stated, "This project will bring positive outcomes to our School District and our community for decades to come."
 

The short documentary video opens with a high school student explaining how human waste flows up from the ground and floods an area where he and his friends eat lunch.

In the eight-minute video with background music and captions of key quotes, students at Druid Hills High School use iPhones to document the classrooms, hallways and bathrooms that are crumbling around them.

In several scenes, plaster is falling off walls, and water is dripping around electrical outlets in one area. So much water has leaked into the weight room that it oozes up from the floor when a student steps on it. Another student demonstrates how one of the holes in a ceiling is so large that he can put his entire hand through it.

“You can tell someone about the conditions but when you visually see it, it’s a lot more impactful,” sophomore Harley Martz, one of the students who produced the video, told The Associated Press in an interview. “Some of the things we pointed out in the video are very undeniable.”

The Wake County school system could up the number of major renovations over the next seven years by cutting back on the number of new schools that will be built. The school board’s facilities committee backed a plan this week to include eight major school renovations and four new schools to the district’s rolling, seven-year building program. The new plan was presented after board members expressed concerns with prior options to fund seven new schools but only five major renovations in the next seven years. “Whatever schools get on the list today are going to need renovations,” said board member Jim Martin, chair of the facilities committee. “The schools that don’t get on the list are going to need renovations. If we’re not doing four to five a year, we’re falling behind.”
Under the new plan, major renovations will be done at North Garner Middle; Lockhart Elementary in Knightdale; Briarcliff Elementary in Cary; Brentwood Elementary, Athens Drive High, Washington Elementary and Ligon Middle in Raleigh; and Zebulon Middle.
The plan’s four new schools are a small high school in West Cary or Morrisville, an elementary school in Wendell or Zebulon, an elementary school on Poole Road in eastern Raleigh and an elementary school in northeastern Raleigh. But the plan is to permanently relocate Wendell Elementary’s students and staff to the new eastern Wake elementary school. The full school board will vote on the plan Tuesday to send to the Wake County Board of Commissioners. COUNTY DEBT LIMIT Funding for the district’s building program comes from a combination of bonds approved by voters and others approved only by the commissioners. Commissioners are expected to place the next school construction bond referendum on the Nov. 8 ballot.
 

The topic of school closures dominated much of Wednesday’s Oakland Unified School District board meeting—the first to be held in person since December and since the school board voted in February to close or consolidate 11 schools over the next two years. Dozens of community members showed up to the meeting at La Escuelita, a bilingual K-8 school near Lake Merritt and one of the schools chosen to be downsized, with signs, posters, and banners to protest the plan.

“There is so much at stake because every single school site is the heart of a community,” said Kira Allen, whose mom worked at Kaiser Elementary for 25 years before it closed last year. “It is a beating heart for these families—for Parker, for Community Day, for La Escuelita. In the very building that we are in, these young children are fighting, and I ask you to stop pretending that [closures] don’t have lifelong effects, and I ask you to think with your heart instead of with your budget.”

TREASURE VALLEY, Idaho — It's no secret that Idaho is growing – bringing hordes of new families to the Treasure Valley and pushing some school facilities to their limit.
U.S. Census Data from 2020 reported a 17.3% increase in the Idaho population since 2010. Much of the growth is in Treasure Valley, Ada County, and the cities of Star and Meridian.
Now, schools must figure out how to accommodate the new wave of students while tending to the current infrastructure.
taxpayers
By: Madison HardyPosted at 9:38 AM, Apr 14, 2022 and last updated 11:44 AM, Apr 14, 2022
TREASURE VALLEY, Idaho — It's no secret that Idaho is growing – bringing hordes of new families to the Treasure Valley and pushing some school facilities to their limit.
U.S. Census Data from 2020 reported a 17.3% increase in the Idaho population since 2010. Much of the growth is in Treasure Valley, Ada County, and the cities of Star and Meridian.
Now, schools must figure out how to accommodate the new wave of students while tending to the current infrastructure.
Recent Stories from kivitv.com
Scott Dorval's Idaho News 6 Forecast - Tuesday 5/3/22
A draft copy of the Nampa School District Facilities Master Plan states that 11 – of the approximately 30 – district buildings are in "critical" condition. Fourteen, the report reads, are considered "poor."
NSD executive director of operations, Peter Jurhs, said a facility FCI score (Facilities Condition Index) measures the level of risk if maintenance is deferred. According to the plan, a building with a more than 30% FCI score was labeled a "critical" condition.
 

OGDEN — Ogden School District is increasingly turning to renewable energy to power its facilities and save money.
The Ben Lomond High School Athletic Center, which opened in December 2020, is fitted with solar panels and data from the first year of operations shows the shift is paying off, district officials say. Data the district recently crunched shows power generated by the panels, located atop the new facility, offset nearly 97% of its power needs in its first year of operation, through November 2021, surpassing the goal of 92%.
“The system saved the district $10,000 in energy costs last summer alone indicating that the investment in solar energy will more than pay for itself in the future,” the district said in a statement.
Placement of the panels represents the extension of a standing Ogden School District energy-efficiency initiative that dates to 2007. The Mound Fort Junior High School Innovation Center, completed in 2019, was the first district facility fitted with solar panels and they were also placed on East Ridge Elementary, which opened last August. They’re to be placed on Polk and Liberty elementary schools, under construction but to open later this year for the 2022-2023 school year.
 

Norfolk City officials made public a major plan on Tuesday to rebuild five city schools over the next decade using local tax revenue from a new casino.

City officials don’t know the total cost of the project yet, but said they plan to take out at least $250 million in new debt for it. That money would be paid back — at least in part — by local tax revenue from the Headwaters Resort and Casino, a gaming facility set to open near Harbor Park in 2024, according to Norfolk City Manager Chip Filer.

“This is a generational change in the facilities of the Norfolk public school system, both through new construction, as well as massive modernization and renovation,” Filer said at a Tuesday city council meeting.

The five schools the city intends to replace or renovate are Maury High School, Booker T. Washington High School, Norview Elementary School, Jacox Elementary School and Granby Elementary School.

Maury High School would be first in line for replacement, with construction beginning as soon as 2025, Filer said.

The 1910-era Maury High School has dire infrastructure and repair needs. City and school officials have been discussing the need to replace the school since at least 2014.

The estimated price tag is $180 million, Filer said.

DANBURY — Stokes County Board of Education members had a lot of numbers thrown at them during the Monday night meeting, as Finance Director Lanette Moore went through the proposed budget for the 2022-2023 school year.

All budget numbers will be pending approval from the County Commissioners.

First up was the Superintendent’s Proposed Current Expense budget for 2022-2023 school year, which totals $17.09 million, an increase of $2 million, or a 14.8%, from the previous year. Moore said the largest increase in salaries and benefits, which make up 55% of the budget.

Moore also went over a 22-item Superintendent’s Recommended Capital expense budget, the Athletic Grant budget and a 25-item “wish list” of additional capital items.

“I don’t see how you keep up with all those numbers,” Board Chair Von Robertson told Moore. “It’s enough to make your head swim.”

During the discussion, Facilities Director Ricky Goins expressed worry at the age of many of the system’s school facilities.

“Chillers,” a critical item used to utilize the power of outside air and water to maintain the target temperature at a constant level, so can be used to cool or heat, have 15 to 18 year life-cycle according to manufacturers, Goins said.

“We’ve got some that are 35 years old.” It cost $350,000 to replace a chiller at West Stokes a year ago, and Goins told the Board that there are four more than could go out at any time.

A new report released Wednesday by the Vermont Agency of Education highlights the deteriorating conditions of Vermont’s decades-old school buildings — a situation that could force lawmakers and school officials to make difficult decisions in the future. 
That report, compiled by the French inspection and certification company Bureau Veritas, does not show in-depth information about any schools; instead, it is a precursor to a more thorough assessment that has not yet begun. 
But the data “indicate an aging portfolio of key systems across the state of Vermont,” the authors of the report wrote, raising the specter of increased construction and renovation costs in the future.  
With coffers full of federal pandemic aid last year, Vermont’s legislature passed a law directing the state Agency of Education to conduct a statewide study to determine how well the state’s school buildings were holding up. 
Now, the first phase of that study is complete. 
For about the past six months, Bureau Veritas has been gathering information from surveys sent to local school officials around the state. The data represents 305 public schools and 384 school buildings from every district and supervisory union in Vermont.
Those buildings are 61 years old on average, the study found, and have gone an average of 22 years without a major renovation.  
Of those 384 buildings, 196 were known to have hazardous materials present, according to survey results, while officials suspected their presence in another 52 buildings. The report did not specify which hazardous materials officials were asked about. 
Roughly 80 buildings had “Indoor Air Quality Issues” while about 50 had “Fire / Life Safety Issues,” although it’s unclear what those issues were. 
 

When last summer’s devastating flood put the town of Waverly, Tenn., underwater, Richard Rye was standing on the roof of the junior high school. The junior high school where, if it had not been a Saturday morning, entire classrooms of kids would have been submerged in five feet of water as a rising swell pushed through the building, ripping heavy doors off their hinges and turning hallways into rivers, desks bobbing in the current like paper cups.
Rye, the director of schools for Humphreys County, stood on that roof for hours and watched first neighboring Waverly Elementary and then Waverly Junior High School, buildings that housed 1,100 total students on any given weekday, fill with water. All he could think was: What am I going to do?
The forecast had showed only a few inches of rain. And Waverly, a rural town with a smaller-than-average Walmart, a few fast-food chains, an AutoZone and not much else, wasn’t seen as a cosmic center of extreme weather. On the night before the flood, many people, including Rye, had sat under the Friday night lights cheering on the high school football team, the Tigers. When the Tigers won, the rain had not yet started to fall.
Then, early on the morning of Aug. 21, Rye woke to a text message from the elementary school principal alerting him that Trace Creek, which winds its way through Waverly, had started rising.
Picture where you are right now and imagine taking 30 or so long steps. That’s the distance from one corner of the school to the water’s edge. That had always worried Rye, especially since the elementary and junior high schools sat in a low-lying area. When he took over as director in July 2020, they had already flooded twice, in 2010 and 2019. Rye had started to build a raised-dirt berm around the buildings in hopes of keeping flooding at bay — the best he could do with limited resources.
By 7:45 a.m. that Saturday, Rye was in his gray Ford Explorer headed to the schools. Within an hour, Rye and a bus mechanic had loaded a truck bed full of sandbags and were beginning to place them around the perimeter of the elementary and junior high buildings. Water lapped around their ankles. A few minutes later, the water was at their knees, then at their waists. The strength of the water threatened Rye’s balance and felt, he remembers, “like a tsunami.” That’s when Rye, along with a few others who were at the campus, opened a supply closet, got a ladder and climbed to the roof.
 

St. Johns County School administrators have taken zoning for the district's next K-8 school off the table.
The reason: Bids for the construction of "School NN" came in higher than the school board was comfortable with. The board voted to reject all three bids at this time, which means the school will most likely not open as slated in 2023-24 in the Shearwater development off County Road 210.
Nicole Cubbedge, the district's director for government and planning relations, said the district was already well ahead of its usual schedule in creating an attendance zone for the new school.
"Since now it may be a 2024 opening, it's too far out to realistically consider (enrollment) numbers," Cubbedge said.
The news was met with mixed feelings by parents of the Rivertown community who spoke out at Tuesday's workshop and school board meeting against several rezoning options that eventually will be affected by the opening of "School NN."
"It does make it so much harder; there's so much up in the air now," said Rivertown parent Stacy Dellone who has two students currently attending Freedom Crossing Academy.
 

Durham’s public school system will begin using a new model for assigning students to schools in the 2023-24 school year, in an attempt to increase equity. On Tuesday, the district announced the new student assignment model through the Growing Together initiative. The current student assignment system was developed in 1992, when schools within the city’s limits merged with schools in the county. A student’s base school assignment is determined by where they currently live in Durham.
The new assignment model will rezone schools into five regions: Northern, Eastern, Central, Southeast and Southwest. The regions were created based on community infrastructure like highways, median household income, the percentage of people of color and the number of school-age children in the region, according to a news release. “We acknowledge that there are clear disparities between our schools,” Melody Marshall, director of student assignment, said in a school district video explaining the changes.
 

Batavia school district officials have outlined the next steps of its “Building Our Future Together” master facilities plan, which may involve the replacement of four of the district’s oldest buildings, which are Alice Gustafson, J.B. Nelson, H.C. Storm and Louise White elementary schools.

According to Superintendent Lisa Hichens, a total of 90 community members attended the four engagement sessions held in February and March to present information to the community and gather feedback. The sessions touched on topics ranging from funding options to new ways facilities could be modernized.

The final engagement session was held on March 24 at Rotolo Middle School, and focused on bringing together all the information from the previous sessions, according to meeting documents.

“People really needed us to explain in great detail why it was more fiscally sound and makes more sense to rebuild some of our schools rather than renovate,” Hichens said. “So even though this plan touches all eight schools, people needed to understand why rebuilding makes more sense at four of our schools.”

According to meeting documents, Alice Gustafson was the only one of the four schools that would be more costly to replace than renovate. The total renovation cost would be $169.2 million, opposed to a total rebuilding cost of $135.3 million for all four schools.

Akron Public Schools would need to spend at least $113 million just to make the necessary roof, HVAC and other repairs essential for students' well-being in 10 of the district's older buildings, according to a draft of a facilities study shared with the school board. 

In comparison, the district usually only has between $1 million to $3 million annually to spend out of the general fund for such repairs in buildings that are not community learning centers. 

The 10 buildings include eight active schools, including North High and Miller South, but also one closed school building, one former school building now used for administrative offices, and Kenmore-Garfield High, which is slated to be empty of students next year after the opening of Garfield Community Learning Center. 

Atlanta, GA — The beautiful brick facade of Druid Hills High School hides an ugly truth.
On the inside, students say, the school building is a neglected mess. The students produced an 8-minute video showing the public what they see when they go to class every day. Recently, the DeKalb School Board voted to remove a “modernization” of Druid Hills High School from a list of proposed school repair and renovation projects sent to the Georgia Department of Education. Students — and their parents — are asking the district to reverse that decision.
The students’ video is a highlight reel of health and safety concerns.
At one point in the video, the students filmed a flaking wall and wrote, “We don’t know what’s in these paint chips or what the mold is.”
When it rains, sewage routinely bubbles up in the picnic area where seniors eat. Poles in one of the school’s computer labs have signs warning students not to touch them or risk getting an electrical shock. There are bathroom stalls with no doors. Sinks that are not adhered to the wall. Water damage in numerous rooms. Mold, too. Emergency vehicles can’t reach the athletic field and back of the school because the driveway is too narrow.
“There appears to be water dripping past electrical boxes,” another caption says.
 

In the absence of a long-term funding plan for the Schools Development Authority, the Murphy administration is tapping the state budget and money borrowed in the COVID-19 pandemic to build new schools to ease overcrowding in New Jersey's poorest communities. 
The patchwork approach avoids adding new construction debt for taxpayers, who are already paying back more than $1 billion a year for money borrowed by the authority more than a decade ago. Gov. Phil Murphy named a leader responsible for securing a new round of multibillion-dollar borrowing for the agency four years ago, but a political patronage scandal derailed those plans.
For now, flush with cash and having no known plans for the authority's future, the state is taking its first significant step after the 2019 scandal to address longstanding problems in outdated and overcrowded schools.
The authority last week approved spending $200 million in new funding — for the first time since Murphy took office in 2018 — to build new schools in Bridgeton, Elizabeth and Garfield. The state identified those locations as having "the highest priority needs" among the SDA districts, Chief Executive Officer Manny Da Silva said.
This new stopgap funding is a small fraction of what's needed across the 31 SDA districts, which are among the poorest and most segregated in the state. The cost of high-priority projects — mostly to address overcrowding — in just half the SDA districts would be $1.97 billion, according to the Murphy administration's own "rough" estimate. 
 

The U.S. Dept. of Energy (DOE) released a Request for Information (RFI) to help decide how best to spend $500 million from the recently passed federal infrastructure law for K-12 public school energy upgrades.
 
The law makes available grants for energy improvements that result in a direct reduction in school energy costs, including improvements to the air conditioning and heating, ventilation, hot water heating, and lighting systems. Funding would also support renovation and repairs that lead to an improvement in teacher and student health. 
 
Many schools are in desperate need of energy improvements, according to a DOE news release. The American Society of Civil Engineers gave the nation’s 100,000 public K-12 schools a D+ in their 2021 Report Card for America’s Infrastructure report.
 

Nearly 2 million Pennsylvania students spend hours a day in thousands of schools across the state. They breathe air that circulates through the buildings, drink water from hallway fountains, and touch surfaces in spaces from classrooms to restrooms.
Years of surveys, policy research, and media reports from around the state suggest that some of these buildings likely pose health risks to students and staff. Schools are subject to safety, sanitation, and health inspections, but these requirements are handled by a mix of local, state, and federal agencies. Those records aren’t kept in a centralized, statewide database.
This makes it difficult for a family or taxpayer to easily access comprehensive information about whether a school facility is up-to-date on maintenance and inspections, information that is readily available for the state’s hospitals, nursing homes, and even local restaurants.
“It’s fragmented because there’s no requirement for it not to be,” said David Lapp, director of policy research with the Pennsylvania education nonprofit Research for Action.
And while most information can be requested from individual schools or districts, they don’t have an obligation to make those records or reports easy to understand, he added.
“Just like with any other kinds of school records, there’s some things that have to be reported, and there’s some things they don’t have to report, or can even keep from the public.”
 

COVID-19 brought to light many worsening issues in education and school facilities, among them poor indoor air quality due to older school infrastructure. 
To begin to remedy that, Vice President Kamala Harris on Monday announced an action plan to put $500 million toward upgrading public school facilities to be more cost- and energy-efficient. The funding is through the Build Back Better Act, a bipartisan infrastructure law passed Nov. 19. 
The administration is also encouraging districts to use American Rescue Plan dollars toward improving their HVAC systems.
In mid-March, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency launched the Clean Air in Buildings Challenge as part of the Biden administration’s efforts to improve ventilation in schools and other buildings. 
A fact sheet on the EPA initiative outlines four steps:
Create an action plan by assessing indoor air quality and making plans for upgrades and improvements to related systems like heating, ventilation and air conditioning.
Bring in and circulate clean outdoor air into indoor spaces.
Enhance air filtration and cleaning via a central HVAC system and in-room air cleaning devices.
Engage local communities in an action plan to improve indoor air quality and health outcomes.