Every child should have access to an outstanding learning environment. But today, many communities face the complex challenge of modernizing aging and deteriorating public schools.
A school is a built environment. Before a single textbook is opened or computer is powered up, a school building and its grounds shape the experiences of students and staff. Research shows that building design and facility conditions significantly influence students’ sense of safety and belonging, their health, and their academic achievement. This happens directly—as an effect of the conditions of classrooms and other student spaces—and indirectly, through the working conditions and social climate a school creates for its community. Quality school facilities are not just buildings — the entire campus is essential educational infrastructure that must be accessible to every student, regardless of their background or location.
See resources in our library that are focused on the impacts that facilities have on student success.
America’s aging and outmoded public school infrastructure undermines educational effectiveness. From the time they enter Pre-K until they graduate high school, millions of children in the U.S. attend school every day in deteriorated and obsolete facilities that undermine their academic achievement. With the average U.S. school building now 50 years old, many school buildings reflect outdated teaching models, lack critical infrastructure such as science labs and maker spaces, and have fallen into disrepair.
Nearly half of all U.S. schools need major upgrades to basic building components, systems, and major appliances. Almost one-third rely on temporary structures never meant for long-term use, fundamentally compromising educational quality. Schools and school districts serving lower-income students tend to have the worst facility conditions.
School districts facing serious deficiencies in roofing, lighting, or security systems
Districts with inadequate heating, ventilation & air conditioning (HVAC) systems in at least half their schools
Districts with multiple building features and systems in need of renovation or replacement
Annual gap between actual funding and funds needed to upgrade and modernize all US public school buildings
Difference between spending by high-poverty vs. low-poverty districts on facilities improvements
Percent less funding available to high-poverty rural school districts for school facilities improvements compared to urban and suburban districts
Today’s schools require robust security systems, technological infrastructure, and resilient design to handle challenges unforeseen a century ago. Modern schools need flexible spaces for collaborative teaching and learning activities while optimizing energy efficiency to save money. Schools also serve their communities in many ways, providing public use of their facilities, serving as disaster response hubs, and serving as polling locations.
Guiding Principles
At NCSI, we believe stewardship encompasses every aspect of infrastructure: building, financing, maintaining, operating, and improving school facilities. Effective stewardship requires a coordinated approach across every part and level of the education system, with high-quality school facilities for all children as a common goal. But in many places, there are structural limitations in the political and administrative systems for facilities stewardship, leading to a crisis in public school facilities. The policies, practices, and funding of local, state, and federal authorities are either underdeveloped, outdated to today’s needs, or both. But realignment and reinvestment across six essential elements of educational facilities stewardship can enable state and school district leaders to develop solutions that work for their communities.
Successful public school facility stewardship involves six key elements: Aligned Governance, Predictable and Fair Funding, Responsible Management, Sound Planning, Reliable Data & Information, and Strong Accountability.
Providing adequate school facilities for all children requires complementary roles for local, state, and, where appropriate, federal stakeholders. In almost every state, local school districts operate the public schools from day to day. Districts are governed by local school boards, whose powers and obligations are defined by state law. Districts are also responsible for adhering to state standards and regulations, but these vary widely from state to state. The result is a disjointed governance structure, fraught with gaps, that does not ensure high-quality school facilities for all students.
Educational quality demands aligned governance systems for public school facilities stewardship, with states playing important roles to help local school districts, especially those in already disadvantaged communities.
Our current system for funding public school infrastructure leaves millions of children and teachers in unhealthy, unsafe, and obsolete public school facilities. Capital financing and annual operating funding from local revenues are unstable and inadequate in all but the wealthiest school districts. Additionally, the burden of maintaining and modernizing school facilities falls almost entirely on local school districts, where both staff capacity and financial resources are scarce.
Increased levels of resourcing and support from state and federal agencies would generate more predictable and fair funding flows to local school districts. Predictability in funding is achieved through dedicated funding streams that support both operating and capital budgets in local school districts. To ensure fairness in funding, all schools must receive enough resources to meet their infrastructure needs, regardless of community wealth.
Many schools struggle to manage and maximize the facility resources they have. In part, this is due to inadequate staffing levels as well as under-training and under-support of staff across various roles. These capacity constraints tend to lead to management practices that are reactive rather than strategic.
Districts must embed a vision and resources for responsible facilities management in their day-to-day operating structure and in their strategic plans. This can empower facility managers to anticipate needs and support educational priorities, and enable them to shift from crisis management to mission-driven stewardship.
School districts do not do nearly enough planning for their facilities. Without adequate plans, districts can only react to facility problems rather than anticipate and mitigate them in a timely fashion.
Sound and strategic facilities planning – which involves assessing current facility conditions, forecasting enrollment and demographic trends, and prioritizing needed investments – optimizes district resources and educational outcomes. Comprehensive plans integrating operations, maintenance, and capital improvements are most effective when guided by clear standards and engage community stakeholders in the planning process.
At the local, state, and national levels, there are insufficient data and information systems about PK-12 educational facilities to guide decision-making. This data gap results in a poorly informed public, overly politicized facilities planning and decision making, inefficient management, little accountability for facilities conditions, and too-little research to understand the health, education, and community impacts of PK–12 infrastructure.
Reliable, comprehensive data on the conditions and qualities of PK-12 facilities enables informed decision-making, helps prioritize maintenance and investments, and reduces politicization. Developing standard facility condition assessments across local, state, and federal levels can provide a rational basis for strategic planning. To improve management practices and guide short- and long-term planning, school districts and states need robust educational facility information systems to collect and organize data.
Strong accountability frameworks based on clear performance metrics are critical for proactive school facilities management. But in many cases, the condition of school facilities are not integrated into accountability frameworks for public education. This means that the system lacks a critical incentive for stewardship.
Performance measures for facilities are essential, just as academic standards drive educational progress. In an accountable system, local school districts will be encouraged – and supported – to anticipate and remedy facility-related risks to the health, safety, and performance of their students and staff. Without such a system, districts can be trapped in cycles of reactivity: deferring maintenance and improvements, making costly emergency repairs, and forever scrambling to catch up with shifts in enrollment and usage. This can also undermine public trust and reduce a district’s effectiveness in preventing waste, fraud, and abuse.
Providing high-quality teaching and learning environments for 50 million students and 6.5 million education staff is complex and demands special knowledge, skill, authority, resources, and—especially—collaboration. NCSI is designed to help school stewards find the resources and connections they need to develop and implement solutions to modernize school buildings and grounds. Change won’t happen overnight, but our work together can help drive a future where every child, every educator, and every family, regardless of their background or zip code, can access a great public school facility that serves their community.
Guide/Tool
National Center on School Infrastructure (NCSI)
This interactive dashboard allows users to visualize the scale, scope, and distribution of state and local public educational facilities inventory, investments, spending, and debt over time.
