Invest in Resilient Public School Infrastructure

With 100,000 facilities, often comprising multiple buildings on multi-acre sites, K-12 schools inevitably lie in the path of weather events and natural disasters. This report briefly surveys 15 years of extreme weather and natural disasters, including super-powered hurricanes and tornadoes, floods, and wildfires, and their impacts on K-12 schools, and makes a concise case for increased capital investment, especially at the federal level, to rebuild affected schools and fortify communities in preparation for future events.

Schools must keep students safe, above all; but, public school facilities also play a major role in protecting the lives of other community members during disasters and aiding recovery afterward. Schools are often central to incident management systems, serving as emergency shelters, command and control centers, and staging areas for aid distribution. To fulfill these roles, school facilities need to be fully functional during and in the aftermath of a disaster. It is estimated that every $1 spent to mitigate the impacts of foreseeable events saves $6 in disaster relief, a cost borne chiefly by federal agencies. For these reasons, the report urges that improving public school facilities to withstand severe weather conditions and building resilience into the design of new facilities should be key goals of the nation’s overall infrastructure policy.

The scale of needs is huge, extending to every community across America. Between 1989 and 2017, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) funded more than 1,000 mitigation projects at K-12 school sites, supporting, for example, flood proofing, safe wind retrofits, and construction of community safe rooms for up to 800 people. But state and local governments have designated many more schools as emergency shelters, and most of those facilities were not designed or constructed to standards that would ensure they can safely operate during a disaster.