The Schools We've Got

The pressing need for modernizing the nation's school facilities is not in dispute. There are over 130,000 public and private K-12 schools in the U.S and about 13,000 public school districts. Even if every brand new school built in the last few years had been a high-performance school (possibly a debatable point), they would still be vastly outnumbered. About 28 percent of all public schools were built before 1950, and 45 percent were built between 1950 and 1969. Chronological age is far from a definite indicator of whether the building should be torn down or not, but there are strong indications that a large majority of these older buildings are not aging all that gracefully.

According to the last comprehensive in-depth study of school buildings, the landmark Condition of America's Public School Facilities (U.S. Department of Education National Center of Education Statistics), in 1999 about three out of four school buildings were considered in need of "repairs, renovations or modernization in order to reach good condition." Ten years later, the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) 2009 Report Card for American Infrastructure gives schools a D, lower than grades for bridges, rail or public transit. Among other conclusions, the report found that "Despite increasing federal mandates on school performance, school facilities in the United States are primarily a local responsibility and there is ample evidence that local communities are struggling to meet this responsibility."

The 1999 study observed, "If schools are unable to obtain the funding they need to perform maintenance or construct new buildings when necessary, facilities problems multiply, which can result not only in health and safety problems, but also in increased costs of repairs." This has proved prescient. The cost estimated in 1999 to bring school buildings into good repair was approximately $127 billion. A 2002 study by the Association of School Business Officials estimated the maintenance backlog in schools at $226 billion. Currently, the National Education Association's estimate is $322 billion.

Shifting toward Modernization

Ordinarily, school authorities facing this backlog of problems in their buildings tend to prefer building a new school. A rough guideline often used in deciding whether to modernize an existing school or scrap it altogether and build new has been that if the renovation will be 60 percent or more of the cost of a new school, then new construction is preferable. But there are signs that any bias in favor of new construction might be shifting towards preserving and modernizing existing schools instead.

Cost is one straightforward reason, especially with bonds and referendums facing a decidedly debt-weary electorate. When the Pennsylvania Department of Education analyzed the 33 new school construction projects and 94 renovation/addition projects approved between October 2003 and December 2006, it found that the average cost per square foot of the new schools was nearly twice the cost of the renovations and additions, with new schools at $212.99 sq. ft. and renovations/additions at $114.62 sq. ft. when all project costs were included (the buildings were all brought up to code and to the same life expectancy as the new buildings).

In a February column titled "2010: The Year of the Existing School," CHPS Executive Director, Bill Orr cited a number of localities shifting resources to modernization, including California, where state school funds for new construction have been largely exhausted but about $1.6 billion in modernization and $80 million in high-performance incentive funding still remains, and legislation has been introduced to make funding for modernization more accessible.

But there is also a growing recognition that there are good environmental and community reasons to modernize existing schools when possible. Preserving existing schools reduces the need to manufacture new steel and other materials, fosters walkable neighborhoods and reduces the need for busing, builds local jobs, and takes advantage of existing infrastructure like water, roads and sewers. The very process of demolishing a building is highly resource intensive, producing an estimated 20 to 30 times as much debris as new construction.

Far from causing a trade-off of high performance when schools are rehabilitated instead of built from scratch, some older buildings can actually be easier to adapt to the 21st century than those built more recently, when cheaper materials and short-cutting techniques became the norm. School buildings built between 1900 and 1940 are commonly solidly built masonry structures, "overdesigned" by today's structural standards and built with workmanship and quality virtually unknown in newer buildings. They often have generous window areas and high ceilings, readily adaptable to daylighting and natural ventilation. In the 100-year-old McGinnis School in urban Perth Amboy, New Jersey, for example, a special sub-frame installation was designed so that new windows could provide state of the art daylighting and thermal performance but preserve the grand character of the building. Even the original circlehead windows, boarded up since the 1950s, are now open to the light and restored to a new life.

The John Henry Neff School originally constructed in 1929 was the first public school in Pennsylvania to employ geothermal heat pumps when it was renovated in 1996. Preserving the best of our existing schools does not rule out incorporating our best new ideas.

Renovation, even though normally less expensive overall, does tend to require more planning and design input from experienced design professionals and knowledgeable manufacturers, particularly when high performance is among the project goals. Historic buildings will require particular expertise, but at the same time often evoke the strongest community support for preservation and modernization.

As in all issues related to schools, the three most important considerations are local, local and local. Individual state departments of education have created publications describing their decision processes and priorities for school facility improvements, and many are on-line. The National Trust for Historic Preservation is one good source for these, and another, as in all issues school construction related, is the National Clearinghouse for Educational Facilities (NCEF).

In addition, the major rating systems are beginning to give existing buildings much greater emphasis, and to provide the kind of guidelines for evaluating and improving existing schools that have been so successful in "greening" new schools.

The Collaborative for High Performance Schools (CHPS) released its new Report Card tool this year on April 26, National Healthy Schools Day. The Operations Report Card is a low-cost, online tool that benchmarks current performance, analyzes existing conditions and recommends green and healthy improvements for existing school buildings. CHPS is was one of the first and still one of the most influential forces in the high performance school movement. In addition to over 300 schools underway around the country seeking CHPS recognition, eleven states have state or region-specific high performance school building criteria based on CHPS, including California, Washington, New York, Massachusetts, Maine, Vermont, New Hampshire, Connecticut, and Rhode Island, and Texas and Colorado are under development.

The U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC) offers the Green Existing Schools Toolkit, providing guidance, best practices, policy and planning templates to assist school officials in seeking LEED for Existing Buildings: O&M certification. LEED for Schools, although primarily targeted at new construction, applies also to major renovations.