New NCSI Resource: A Self-Guided Workshop Series for Local Educational Facility Master Planning

Every school district eventually faces hard questions about its buildings. Questions like:

• Which schools need a new roof, and which need to be replaced? 
• Where are classrooms overcrowded, and where are half-empty buildings draining resources? 
• Should a district renovate an aging school or build a new school? 

Educational facilities master planning is how a district answers those questions in a coordinated way, rather than one emergency at a time. 

Educational Facility Master Planning: A Self-Guided Workshop Series is a new free guide from the National Center on School Infrastructure (NCSI) and the National Council on School Facilities (NCSF) that walks district teams through the planning process, step by step.

The guide was created to help district staff who are responsible for structuring and organizing the planning process, often without much help. It is especially useful for small and mid-sized districts with no dedicated facilities planning staff and/or no budget to hire an outside consultant to run the process. A superintendent, facilities/maintenance director, or planning lead can use the guide to run the process in-house. The guide can also be used as a “workbook” for an internal planning team or for a technical assistance provider guiding a district team. 

The guide outlines a structured planning framework consisting of five meetings: 

• In the first meeting, the team gathers data and agrees on a vision for its facilities to support district goals. 
• In the second meeting, it sets criteria to assess options and narrow choices to 3-5 key ideas. 
• In the third meeting, the team turns the 3-5 ideas into more specific options, including rough cost estimates and anticipated timelines for each one. 
• In the fourth meeting, the team tests the options against the critiques it expects to hear from different community stakeholders. 
• In the fifth meeting, the team settles on a main recommendation and plans how to communicate their choice with stakeholders. 

Each meeting includes one required “core exercise” that produces a specific, decision-ready product, plus optional “explore further” material for districts with more time or more complex situations.

Key to the process is collecting local data. The four key pieces of data are: 

• Facility condition compares the cost of fixing a building to the cost of replacing it; once repairs approach half the replacement cost, a major renovation or rebuild starts to make more financial sense. 
• Minimum viable enrollment is the number of students a school needs to pay for the staff and programs the district wants every child to have. 
• Educational adequacy asks whether a building supports good teaching; a simple test is the share of classrooms under 700 square feet, which typically forces classes to be organized into rows and lecture-style instruction. 
• Capacity and utilization compares how many students a building can realistically hold given its design and the programs operating inside (capacity) with how many it actually serves (utilization). 

Keep in mind that no single data point should drive decisions. Local decision-making benefits when you consider these numbers together in light of district objectives and aspirations.

The guide recommends teams consider a range of choices rather than a single preferred answer. Options run along a continuum from least change (targeted repairs such as new roofs or HVAC systems) to moderate change (renovations, additions, repurposing a building), significant change (new construction, consolidations, boundary changes), and transformational change (rethinking how the district’s schools are organized, such as moving to K-8 campuses). Each option should be grounded in the district’s data and faithful to its vision. Just as important, it has to be achievable within the district’s budget. Anything less is “simply a wish you cannot afford to implement.”

An important message in the guide is that doing nothing is not free: keeping an aging, underused school open has real costs to the school district, and those costs should be laid out as clearly as the costs associated with any major facility changes. 

The guide lays out a framework where every option is tested against three key questions: 

• Is it adequate, giving every student clean air, enough room, and enough caring adults? 
• Is it accessible, so every community has fair access to a well-resourced school? 
• And is it affordable, both to build and to staff and operate for years to come?

As the guide notes, the hardest part of educational facility master planning is often the necessary community engagement in the planning process. To assist on this front, the guide helps teams prepare for the critiques they are most likely to hear from stakeholders, especially about costs and, if applicable, considerations of school closures or consolidations.

A district that works through the five meetings comes away with a practical toolkit: a data summary for every school, a vision statement, an evaluation framework, costed option worksheets, prepared responses to critiques with a risk assessment, a final decision matrix, and a communication plan for the board, community, and staff. Together, these tell the story of what the district considered, why it chose what it did, and how it will stay accountable to that choice. 

The guide was adapted by Sturtz & Company, in partnership with Olsen Edvantage, from a longer workshop series they developed for local education agencies in select NCSI partner states.