Early Findings from the HVAC Change Lab

When a school’s heating and cooling system fails, or simply never worked well to begin with, the consequences show up in classrooms and on bottom lines. Students struggle to concentrate in rooms that are too hot or too cold. Students unnecessarily miss more days of school when poor ventilation allows illness to spread. Districts managing aging or failing systems spend heavily on emergency repairs, repeated like-for-like replacements that don’t solve underlying failure modes, and energy bills inflated by inefficient equipment. In the roughly 36,000 U.S. public schools with aging or inadequate HVAC systems, this is not an occasional inconvenience. It is the daily baseline.

The fix is straightforward: modern, high-efficiency HVAC systems improve air quality, regulate temperature, reduce energy costs, and make schools more resilient during extreme heat and wildfire smoke events. The problem is that upgrading those systems at scale, across thousands of under-resourced districts, is anything but simple. HVAC modernization requires coordinating change across multiple departments, decision-makers, and priorities simultaneously. Limitations in technical knowledge, staff capacity, and funding all get in the way of progress.

The HVAC Change Lab, launched spring 2026, is designed to address these challenges head-on. Co-led by the Center for Green Schools at the U.S. Green Building Council, the New Buildings Institute, and the National Center on School Infrastructure, the Change Lab works to help school districts overcome the barriers to HVAC modernization through peer-learning and direct technical assistance from an array of coordinated partners. Fourteen school districts across 11 states, spanning both rural and urban contexts and together operating roughly 850 school buildings that serve more than 500,000 students, are participating in the Change Lab’s inaugural cohort.

But the Change Lab is designed not just to help these districts solve their particular challenges. It’s also invested in surfacing the hurdles that commonly block progress, documenting emerging practices, and developing common resources that can transform isolated local experiences into field-wide knowledge. In listening to Change Lab participants describe the key barriers and successes shaping their work to date, several key issues came up consistently and across very different contexts. Taken together, they point toward tools and resources that are needed to advance practice across the field.

Before a single piece of equipment is selected or a contractor is hired, districts face a set of financial decisions that will shape the entire project. How do you make the case for a higher-performing system when a cheaper one is on the table? How do you account for energy and maintenance savings that won’t show up for years? And how do you access federal incentives that could significantly offset costs, but require upfront capital and a level of technical and legal fluency most districts don’t yet have?

Issues raised by the cohort point to supports that are needed to manage through these questions.

When good projects get cut before they start

Value engineering — the process of reviewing a project’s scope and cost during design development — is an often necessary part of capital planning. But several districts described it as one of the top threats to HVAC projects that go beyond like-for-like replacements.

When capital planning is separated from facilities management, higher-efficiency scope can get removed during design or construction phases without meaningful input from the teams responsible for long-term operation and maintenance. The result is a cheaper system getting installed, and a more expensive operations and maintenance burden following.

The districts that navigate this most effectively have two things in their back pocket. First, credible life-cycle cost analysis they can put in front of board members. Second, a district-level policy anchor — a board resolution, a city ordinance, a state requirement — that came before the technical decision and gave project teams something to point to when first-cost pressure arrived.

Tax credits: Real dollars, real complexity

Federal clean energy incentives represent one of the most significant financial opportunities available to districts pursuing high-efficiency HVAC upgrades. Nearly every district in the cohort asked about clean energy investment tax credits (ITC), the availability of direct pay (also called elective pay, a provision that allows non-taxable entities like school districts to receive tax credit value as a direct cash payment) for non-taxable school districts, and the 179D tax deduction for energy-efficient building improvements. But few have a clear picture of how these actually apply to their situation and how to manage the upfront costs of using tax credits. Tax credits put real dollars on the table, but applying for and using them feels complex.

School districts are not risk-seeking organizations, and for good reason: they’re accountable to elected boards, tight budgets, and communities that depend on schools staying open and functional. But external accountability is only part of the picture. Inside district organizations, inertia has its own sources, rooted in staff roles, institutional habits, and the way decisions get made across teams. In organizations where a failed project has real consequences, staying the course functions as a form of risk management, even when it produces worse outcomes over time. These dynamics tend to surface earliest in the planning and design phase, when key decisions about system type, scope, and performance targets are still open. By the time a project reaches procurement or construction, the defaults are usually already baked in. This points to a challenge that centers on organizational culture and the conditions that enable or undermine change.

“This is the way we’ve always done it” mentality

Across districts, teams described a consistent tendency to default toward familiar HVAC solutions. Maintenance staff may be concerned about what new technologies will mean for their training and repair burden. Project managers may default to what they know in order to minimize perceived risk. Designers and installers may reach for the cheapest familiar option that they’ve personally seen deliver acceptable results. Even when districts are interested in better solutions, uncertainty around operations, maintenance, and long-term reliability can pull projects back toward like-for-like replacements.

Districts that have successfully moved past this pattern tend to credit internal champions coupled with trusted, independent third parties who can draw on lessons learned from successful projects, make connections to regional organizations that have already been down the same road, and change the conversation.

Once the financial case is made and the planning process is underway, districts face a different set of challenges: translating goals into technically sound, consistently applied project requirements. Across the cohort, the absence of helpful technical tools — standards, specifications, and guidance — emerged as a persistent source of inefficiency and missed opportunity.

The small projects no one wrote standards for

Much of the HVAC work delivered in K-12 districts comes in the form of small, incremental projects: roof-top unit replacements, mini-split installations, controls retrofits, ventilation upgrades, and like-for-like partial system replacements. While existing technical standards and frameworks like LEED, WELL, Living Building Challenge, and CHPS provide rigorous criteria for new construction and major renovations, they are not easily adapted to these small-scale HVAC projects.

As a result, districts are left without clear best-practice guidance for the work they perform most frequently. Without that guidance, reactive band-aid fixes and repeated like-for-like replacements become the default.

The specifications gap

Once the financial case is made and the planning process is underway, districts face a different set of challenges: translating goals into technically sound, consistently applied project requirements. Across the cohort, the absence of helpful technical tools, owner’s project requirements (OPRs), standards, specifications, and guidance, emerged as a persistent source of inefficiency and missed opportunity.

In one striking example, two similarly-sized middle schools in the same district ended up with dramatically different geothermal field sizes, and price tags, because two different engineers interpreted the same performance specification in different ways. The language was identical. The resulting designs were not.

A district-owned design standard is critical for consistency across projects and teams. Without it, project outcomes may be shaped by the preferences and assumptions of whichever engineer or consultant happens to be involved, turning each project into a one-off negotiation rather than part of a cohesive long-term strategy.

A well-designed HVAC project can still fail, not because the design was wrong, but because of what happens between the design and the day-to-day reality of operating the system. Two distinct failure modes surfaced across the cohort: problems that originate during procurement and installation, when the conditions required for a system to perform as intended aren’t in place; and problems that emerge at handoff, when the transition from installer to operator is rushed, incomplete, or sets the district up for long-term dependency.

VRF: An install problem, not an equipment problem

In talking through challenges that several districts are facing with variable refrigerant flow (VRF) systems, a type of highly efficient heat pump technology increasingly common in school retrofits, what emerged were issues related to inconsistent installation quality under low-bid conditions. Several districts are now moving toward alternatives not because VRF is bad technology, but because their procurement processes don’t reliably produce the install quality VRF requires.

Commissioning and handoff: A universal pain point

Commissioning and handoff problems surfaced in nearly every district. The transition from the design and installation team to the district maintenance team is too often rushed, under-resourced, or incomplete, creating long-term operational and financial consequences.

Districts shared a range of examples: one rural district lost a full summer of anticipated utility savings because commissioning was pushed to the end of a two-phase project. A large urban district expressed frustration with a proprietary building automation system (BAS) that has left them dependent on the vendor for expensive routine adjustments. Another district found that commissioning provided by their design firm lacked independent oversight, leading them to advocate for third-party commissioning contracted directly by the owner.

Several lessons emerged. Commissioning without meaningful owner-side oversight becomes paperwork on a shelf rather than a true quality assurance process. Poorly defined handoff requirements can unintentionally lock districts into long-term vendor dependencies. And training delivered the day equipment is installed is mostly forgotten by the time something breaks years later.

The four issues above describe barriers that districts can, in principle, address with better tools, clearer standards, and stronger peer networks. But the cohort conversations also surfaced something harder to fix at the project level: a set of conditions in the broader environment that make good work easier or harder regardless of what any individual district does.

• Engineering attention is drifting away from schools. As MEP (mechanical, electrical, and plumbing) firms increasingly orient toward data-center clients, where contracts are larger and timelines more predictable, schools are getting slower service and less senior attention from the firms they depend on. This is a market-level shift that no district can solve alone, and its one reason that stronger owner-side capacity matters more than ever.
• Data access is fragile in ways that undermine even basic energy management. Whether a district can track its own utility data reliably often comes down to which utility serves it, a function of geography, not strategy. Until districts have more consistent access to their own building performance data, almost every other improvement becomes harder to sustain.
• Policy is the most underused enabler in the field. Districts that have moved fastest on HVAC modernization tend to have one thing in common: a policy commitment, a board resolution, a city ordinance, a state requirement, that came before the technical decision and gave project teams something to point to when first-cost pressure arrived. Where that policy exists, the technical conversation gets easier. Where it doesn’t, every project becomes a fresh negotiation.
• And cutting across all of it: staffing. Several districts in the cohort have leadership teams that have been in role for under two years, and at least one key position is grant-funded with an expiration date in sight. When the people doing this work cycle out faster than the projects they’re managing, even the best tools and templates lose their power. Staffing isn’t a separate barrier so much as a multiplier on every other one.

What these findings confirm is that the gap isn’t primarily one of district motivation or funding. It’s a gap in shared infrastructure – standards, templates, tools, case studies, and worked examples – that can support this work. Once built, these resources can be used by any school district to advance facilities modernization.

But we know that what we’re hearing from Change Lab participants are pieces of a much larger puzzle. If you’re working through similar challenges, have seen what works (or hasn’t), or want to engage in what the Change Lab is building, we’d love to hear from you. The tools and resources we’re developing will only be as useful as the range of perspectives that inform them. Use the form below to reach out, share your experience, and follow along as we continue to build capacities across the field for improving school facilities.