Public Schools as Partners: Why Local Governments and School Districts Need to Collaborate

This report makes the case that school districts and local governments share fundamental interests in community health, economic development, and public infrastructure, and that closer collaboration between the two is essential for sound community planning. It positions public schools as anchors of neighborhoods and argues that planners routinely underestimate how school siting, enrollment changes, closures, and facilities decisions shape land use, housing values, transportation patterns, and public health outcomes.

The report distinguishes between “pro-active” and “re-active” relationships between cities and school districts, and catalogs a wide range of obstacles to collaboration: lack of a formal communication process, differing governmental structures and jurisdictional boundaries, absence of school district planning staff (particularly in small and rural districts), weak state planning laws, limited treatment of schools in comprehensive plans, conflicts over development regulations, and failure to coordinate capital improvement plans. A real-world example from Dayton, Ohio—where a city income tax increase and a school district property tax measure were placed on the same November ballot without either entity’s knowledge of the other—illustrates the consequences of reactive governance.

The report also catalogs existing examples of collaboration, including Florida’s mandated interlocal agreements for school concurrency, consistent school development standards in Charlotte-Mecklenburg and Washoe County (Nevada), land banks and joint-use agreements, policy documents such as Maryland’s Models & Guidelines #27 and Oregon’s School Siting Handbook, and neighborhood improvement programs tied to school investment such as Baltimore’s INSPIRE program and Buffalo’s Better Schools Better Neighborhoods initiative.

Appendix A contains separate collaboration checklists for school districts and local governments, covering communication, planning capacity, school siting, school closures, comprehensive plans, housing, neighborhood conditions, and transportation. The document frames itself as a potential foundation for a national APA policy guide on school/local government collaboration.