Inside-Out Change: Systems, Stewardship, and the Future of School Infrastructure

Anisa Heming is director of the Center for Green Schools at the U.S. Green Building Council. This post is drawn from a conversation with Heming about what it takes to create lasting change in the human-centeredness and resilience of school facilities.

Efforts to improve school facilities often begin with discrete solutions: a new building, a technology upgrade, a pilot program. Yet practitioners working to create sustainable, healthy, and resilient learning environments consistently encounter a more layered reality — one in which meaningful progress depends less on isolated interventions than on transformations within complex institutional systems.

Anisa Heming, director of the Center for Green Schools (the Center) at the U.S. Green Building Council, has an elegant perspective on this tension: she characterizes schools not as static edifices but as dynamic organisms. For change to happen, she argues, “someone who knows the system must be able to see how it might evolve.” The implication is profound: improvement isn’t driven solely through technical guidance or capital investment in a single project. Durable change must be cultivated from within, through the people, relationships, and commitment to stewardship that districts sustain over time.

The early development of national green schools work reflected this orientation toward systems thinking. Heming recalls that while initial efforts involved experimentation — “throw spaghetti against a wall and see what sticks” — the Center’s efforts gradually converged on a central lever for improvement: the individuals working inside districts.

The Center began equipping those individuals with professional development, networks, and shared resources. Rather than positioning external standards as the primary driver of change, the work centered on enabling practitioners to interpret and apply best practices within the constraints of their local context.

The Center’s work thus focuses less on building district knowledge about what sustainable facilities improvement looks like and more on building the capacity to implement it. As Heming notes, practitioners frequently recognize the implications of infrastructure decisions yet remain constrained by competing demands and limited resources. Many are “just trying to put band-aids on the problems,” navigating immediate operational pressures while attempting to plan for long-term needs. 

“It’s so rare that I come across someone who says, ‘We don’t want to change because we think our current practice is better,’” Heming explains. “When I encounter resistance to change, it’s almost always because the requirements of change feel impossible to districts. Trying to invest in something new, structuring the financing to do it, and then training their staff—it’s overwhelming to a lot of people, especially in cash-strapped school districts.” The Center’s mission is to provide the support districts need to make that change a reality.

Heming contends that solutions depend in part on how school stakeholders conceptualize the role of facilities within education systems. She notes that school buildings are often treated as background assets — necessary but secondary to instructional priorities. This framing shapes decision-making, particularly when resources are scarce.

Heming observes that facilities leaders frequently internalize this hierarchy. They may hesitate to request additional resources because they believe “all the resources of the organization should go toward the education of the students.” While grounded in a commitment to instructional outcomes, this dynamic can inadvertently delay essential investments until problems become acute.

Framing infrastructure as integral to educational mission alters this calculus. Sustainable school environments, Heming explains, are designed around human performance. “You’re creating a place where human bodies need to be able to function as well as they can function.” Attention to environmental conditions — including air quality, thermal comfort, and acoustics — is therefore foundational to learning.

This perspective positions facilities stewardship as an educational responsibility rather than a competing priority.

While sustainable practices are increasingly being adopted by schools, in some places the conversation around sustainability is still evolving. Heming resists framing sustainable approaches as specialized or optional, seeing the distinction between conventional practice and sustainable practice  as increasingly artificial

“The best practices that we encourage school districts to adopt are the practices, period,” she states. In Heming’s experience, “many districts will choose to adopt healthier and more efficient practices because they know that those practices are better in the long run for student and teacher health and for their long-term budgets.” 

The gap in adoption isn’t about disagreement. It’s about capacity. “You can’t adopt any new or different practices at all if you don’t have any money to do anything,” she explains. Once districts are operationally stable, many naturally pursue healthier and more efficient approaches because they align with long-term goals for student well-being and fiscal responsibility.

This observation shifts the policy conversation. Rather than debating whether sustainable practices are appropriate, the focus turns to enabling conditions — funding structures, staffing models, and access to expertise — that allow districts to act on existing knowledge.

The experience of pandemic response reinforced this dynamic. Several months into the pandemic, guidance around environmental improvements was widely understood; the challenge lay in determining “what is getting in the way of you doing that.” Identifying those barriers became as important as defining the practices themselves.

Systems thinking extends to Heming’s considerations of how school facilities are funded. Here she identifies a mismatch between public infrastructure and market-based ways of measuring value. School buildings are long-term public assets whose value cannot be captured through resale or traditional return-on-investment metrics.

“You’re not going to get an ROI on a school building in the traditional sense, because you’re likely never selling the building,” she explains. The right question isn’t whether a facility will appreciate in value, but whether it creates the conditions students and communities need to thrive.

Heming acknowledges that the current funding system for facilities improvements is flawed. Because funding is tied to local property wealth, districts with the greatest needs often have the fewest resources and lowest capacity available to meet those needs. This widens the gap between wealthy and high-need districts, regardless of local commitment to improving schools. “We can’t rely on local communities, which have huge disparities in wealth, to fund their school buildings,” Heming says. “That merely replicates inequity.” 

To illustrate the problem, she points to an example of a small rural district facing a $20 million repair or rebuild. “Nowhere in their community do they have that level of resourcing,” she says. “If they taxed every resident 100% of their income, they wouldn’t have that money.” Closing these gaps, she argues, requires systemic solutions — such as statewide financing structures, coordinated with federal support where available — rather than expecting under-resourced communities to solve the problem on their own.

For Heming, facilities decisions communicate institutional priorities to students. Investments in healthier, more resilient environments signal that educational systems are oriented toward the future. They demonstrate that adults are willing to build conditions that support both present learning and long-term well-being.

“If we show kids that we believe there is a better future for them and all of us, and that we can build that future,” she says, “that is communicating the optimism that they need to do good work in the world.”

In this sense, school infrastructure is not merely operational. It is expressive. How school leaders steward systems to maintain and improve physical environments reflects their commitment to students.

Meaningful progress, Heming suggests, will not stem from singular solutions. It will emerge from strengthening the people, structures, and funding models that enable districts to sustain change over time — building capacity within the systems that shape where learning happens.

Explore Center for Green Schools tools in the NCSI library, and visit the Center’s website for additional resources and opportunities to connect to their network.