Center for Cities and Schools

Amid fires, wildfire smoke, extreme heat, and other climate-driven disasters and health hazards, California’s leading experts in children’s health and education have come together to call for a cost-effective, ten year $150 billion investment to ensure K-12 public schools can remain open and provide safe and healthy places for California’s children to learn and grow. This coalition of more than 50 stakeholders urges state lawmakers to prioritize schools in California’s climate action plan, and proposes a path to ensuring every school in the state helps to mitigate both the impacts and the causes of the climate crisis. This is the first comprehensive report on climate-driven impacts on children in CA that addresses the full scope of the problem while laying out an immediately actionable plan.

Children born today will bear the brunt of the burden of climate change despite having the least responsibility for causing it. Growing calls to position climate change as a child’s rights crisis are rooted in research on the unique physical and mental health impacts that high temperatures, poor air quality, and stress associated with living through natural disasters have on the most important developmental years in a person’s life.

Mitigating existing challenges and preventing harm to future generations will require collaborative policies and interventions that cut across climate science, early care and education, public health, and countless other disciplines. In a new paper, the Low Income Investment Fund and the Center for Cities and Schools at the University of California, Berkeley, make the case for explicit focus on and improvements to the physical settings where young children spend their time.

LIIF and the Center for Cities + Schools at UC Berkeley’s new paper explores climate vulnerabilities facing the child care sector and recommendations to plan for and address the consequences of increasingly harsh weather patterns. “Many homes and early care and education facilities are largely unequipped to withstand the impacts of a worsening climate.”

Education Workforce Housing in California: Developing the 21st Century Campus, a new report and companion handbook from cityLAB, Center for Cities + Schools, and the Terner Center for Housing Innovation, provides a comprehensive overview of the potential for land owned by school districts to be designed and developed for teachers and other employees.

Developed in collaboration with the California School Boards Association (CSBA) and funded by the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI), this research inventories tens of thousands of potential sites, shows a range of housing design strategies, and lays out a roadmap for school districts interested in exploring this transformative opportunity to enable more teachers and staff to live in the communities that they serve.

The report also makes important recommendations for state policy reforms to encourage education workforce housing. The report is accompanied by an illustrated Handbook that provides a how-to guide for school boards, administrators, and community members to advocate for and advance the development of education workforce housing on underutilized schools lands in communities across California.

Public school districts across California struggle to upkeep and modernize their school facilities. For many districts, aging inventory, coupled with limited capital funding opportunities, has led to school facilities with ballooning deferred maintenance problems and classrooms that do not appropriately support modern instructional practices. These realities also work against California’s priorities for high quality, equitable education, childhood health, racial justice, and climate resiliency.

In this paper, we investigate adequacy and equity of investment in California’s public school facilities. By using a standards-based framework to understand patterns of investment levels, we gauge the likely “good stewardship” of these physical school assets. We look at both “maintenance & operations” (M&O) spending and capital investment by local K-12 public school districts across the state for the years 2009-2019.

In 2017, the California Department of Education (CDE) announced the “Small School District Assistance Initiative,” aimed at providing targeted assistance to small and rural school districts in the state. To aid CDE’s efforts, this study investigates the facility challenges and issues facing rural and small school districts in California. We utilize a mixed method approach to understand the capital investment patterns and facility planning processes of rural and small public school districts in California. In Part II we present findings from analysis of school district data on facility-related characteristics and spending trends. In Part III, we present findings from interviews with 40 rural and small school district officials from across California.

A joint report from the Center for Cities + Schools, 21st Century School Fund, Center for Green Schools, and National Council on School Facilities

Our country’s elementary and secondary (PK–12) public school infrastructure is in crisis. Every day, millions of children in the U.S. attend public school in unhealthy, unsafe, educationally inadequate, environmentally unsustainable, and financially inefficient facilities. Our public school facilities have broad impacts on children and communities: student, staff, and community health; school quality and academic achievement; economic development; and environment and natural resources. We need effective and efficient systems to ensure responsible stewardship of our PK-12 public school infrastructure.

With much at stake, national leaders launched the Planning for PK-12 Infrastructure Initiative (P4si Initiative) in 2016 to formulate a systems-based plan to address the PK-12 infrastructure crisis. This report presents findings from the Phase 1 national research engagement process to identify the challenges to adequacy and equity in PK-12 infrastructure and to propose system reforms. Our recommended priority actions are designed to develop and support the essentials for modern PK-12 public infrastructure stewardship. Phase 2 of the P4si Initiative will move the 55 priority actions forward to achieve a paradigm shift in our PK-12 public infrastructure systems.

California’s 6-million-student public school system includes a vast inventory of publicly owned buildings and property. All of these facilities need to be maintained and some need major renovations to ensure health, safety, and educational suitability. Some communities also need new school buildings to house a growing student population.Research suggests students learn better in classrooms that are modern, comfortable, and safe, but the age and condition of school facilities varies widely across the state. According to a recent estimate, california school districts need to spend between $3.1 billion and $4.1 billion annually just to maintain their existing facilities. Further, the total amount of facility funding needed for california schools during the next decade for modernization and new construction is expected to be about $117 billion.

Meanwhile, many observers raise concerns about the state’s current policies related to school facility funding. They cite disparities in school facilities conditions and revenues across districts, and argue that the state’s school facilities funding system does not target aid toward districts with the greatest facility needs.

This study explains California’s approach to financing public school facilities and examines the level and distribution of state and local school facility funding since 2006, including facility funding for charter schools.

Key findings:

• Local sources of school facility funding greatly outstrip state support.• School facility funding is volatile and has declined since 2006.• Wide disparities in school facility funding that are systematically related to school district property wealth, income, and students’ backgrounds result in a relatively regressive finance system.• Charter school facility funding continues to expand.

Through this initiative, six national cross-sector working groups have developed a menu of solutions to guide government, industry, labor, and the civic sector in the delivery of high performance public PK-12 infrastructure for all children. The six working groups are organized around basic elements of a well-managed facilities program: Data and Information, Educational Facilities Planning, Management, Funding, Governance and Decision Making, and Accountability. This map identifies policies, practices, and tools needed to structure, manage and fund the public and private capacity for equitable and efficient public school facilities for all communities.