By Emma
Brown, Washington Post | http://wapo.st/1pIoEH1
 |
| The ceiling is crumbling in this room at Ron Brown Academy, an elementary school in Detroit. (Detroit Federation of Teachers) |
March 23 at 3:00 AM :: The nation is spending $46 billion less
each year on school construction and maintenance than is necessary to ensure
safe and healthy facilities, according to estimates in a new report.
The study, released by a group that advocates for
environmentally-sound buildings, is meant to draw attention to the
condition of buildings that on weekdays house some 56 million students and
teachers — more than one-sixth of the U.S. population — but that nevertheless
attract little attention in the national debate over education policy and
reform.
“We are consistently and persistently underinvesting in our
nation’s schools,” said Rachel Gutter of the D.C.-based Center for Green
Schools at the U.S. Green Building Council, which co-authored the report.
“Communities want to resolve these issues, but in many cases the funds simply
aren’t there.”
Detroit has made headlines this
year for crumbling schools plagued by rats, roaches and mold. But
while conditions in the Motor City are particularly deplorable, the
average U.S. school is more than 40 years old, and thousands of school
buildings nationwide are in need of upgrades, according to the federal
government.
Poor communities in far-flung rural places and declining
industrial city centers tend to be in a particularly bad situation: School
construction budgets rely even more heavily on local dollars than operating
budgets. And in many places spending has not recovered from cuts made
during the recession, leaving school districts struggling to patch
problems.
In Philadelphia, which has suffered deep budget cuts in
recent years, an elementary school was forced to delay its opening last
fall after a worker discovered that the building’s foundation was
structurally unsound. A boiler exploded at another of the city’s elementary
schools in January, seriously injuring an employee.
“These things are happening because too many public
officials have turned a blind eye to what’s really going on in schools across
Pennsylvania,” Pennsylvania Sen. Vincent Hughes (D) said in a statement,
calling on the state legislature to increase its investment in public
education. “This is a fool’s errand.”
The federal government contributes about 10 percent to
operating budgets but virtually nothing to school construction or renovation.
Some states, such as Wyoming and New Mexico, have strong statewide programs for
school construction, but a dozen states offer no assistance, which means the
cost of school construction falls entirely on local taxpayers.
Among the states that do not contribute to
school construction is Michigan, where Detroit has struggled so mightily to
maintain healthy and safe buildings. Others are Wisconsin, Indiana, Oregon and
Nevada.
“It’s entirely tied to the wealth of the
district,” said Mary Filardo, executive director of the 21st Century Schools
Fund, a D.C.-based nonprofit and report co-author. “It’s got inequity built
into it.”
States in white contribute nothing to local school construction projects. (Source: State of Our Schools 2016)
Filardo said that there is a growing body of research
that shows links between the school environment and a child’s ability to
learn, and yet the condition of school buildings remains little-mentioned in
discussions about closing achievement gaps.
She suggested that the federal government could help push
for equitable school facilities by providing funding for construction in
high-poverty schools, as it now does for teaching and learning through the
Title I program. But that would be politically difficult given the GOP-led
Congress and its push to shrink federal spending, she acknowledged.
The last time the federal government attempted to survey the
condition of the nation’s school buildings was in 1995. At the time, more than
8 million students attended 15,000 schools with poor air quality; 12
million students attended 21,000 schools in need of new roofs or roof upgrades;
12 millions students attended 23,000 schools with inadequate plumbing.
And the list goes on: The Government Accountability
Office estimated that it would cost about $112 billion to ensure that
all schools were in good condition.
In the two decades since the GAO made
that estimate, the nation has spent an average of $99 billion a year on
maintenance, operations and construction, according to the new study.
And that’s far less than the $145 billion
that’s needed, according to the study, which suggested a standard — a
tweaked version of commercial-building standards — that should be used to
estimate the cost of maintaining the nation’s school facilities.
The report calls not only for greater public investment in
school facilities, but also for an effort to collect and share more
information about the condition of school buildings — which account
for the second-highest level of public infrastructure spending, after
highways.
There is no comprehensive federal data source on school
buildings, and the quality and amount of information varies widely at the state
level. The inconsistency and scarcity of data on schools has contributed to
their neglect, Gutter said: “This is a problem that we’ve just made it so easy
for ourselves to ignore.”
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