The State of Facilities Master Planning in California’s TK-12 School Districts: With a Special Emphasis on the Integration of Environmental Sustainability and Climate Resilience

This report presents findings from a statewide analysis of Facilities Master Plans (FMPs) across California’s TK-12 school districts. The study examines how widely FMPs are adopted, how well they address core planning components, and the extent to which they incorporate environmental sustainability and climate resilience—questions made urgent by California’s Proposition 2 (November 2024), which now requires districts to have a current FMP to access state school facilities funding.

As of December 2025, only 264 of California’s 937 school districts had a publicly accessible FMP, and fewer than half had been updated within the past five years. The research team developed a seven-component scoring rubric—covering facility inventory and condition assessment, long-term enrollment and capacity planning, educational alignment, outdoor spaces and campus greening, climate risk and mitigation, energy efficiency and resilience, and financial planning and capital strategy—and used a large language model (LLM) to score 208 PDF-format plans.

Results reveal a clear two-tier pattern: districts score consistently high on traditional planning components (facility inventory, financial planning, enrollment projections) but significantly lower on emerging challenges. Climate risk is the lowest-scoring component, with 49 percent of plans at the minimal acknowledgment level and 14 percent making no mention of climate at all. Energy efficiency and outdoor greening show similar gaps. Districts with FMPs skew toward larger, urban, and suburban locales; those with a history of passing bond measures are significantly more likely to have a plan.

The report recommends scaled expectations by district size, model FMP templates, and targeted technical assistance for smaller and rural districts. It identifies Proposition 2 as an opportunity to raise the floor and expand what a high-quality FMP should accomplish.