WASHINGTON — Lewis Ferebee, chancellor of District of Columbia Public Schools, stands at the top of a staircase at John Lewis Elementary when he’s approached by a couple of his constituents for handshakes. He has to reach down a bit — the third-grade boys only stand about waist-high to Ferebee.

The school got a face-lift three years ago. The renovations transformed the noisy, open-concept hallways — relics of the Open Education Movement from the ’60s and ’70s — into individual classrooms. Teachers can now talk to their students without the distracting din of chatter from other classrooms, but the garage doors that double as windows can be opened when teachers want to do activities that involve getting students from multiple classrooms working together.

The work that went into John Lewis Elementary highlights something unique about DC Public Schools. Since 2007, its Office of Public Education Facilities Modernization has kept and systematically worked through a schedule for upgrading schools. At the time, the district reportedly had a backlog of 20,000 work orders.

That level of overwhelm may sound familiar to educators at school districts nationwide who work in school buildings that are “in dire need of renovation,” as described in a recent brief from the Joint Economic Committee of Congress.

The average age of school buildings is 49 years — just shy of the end of their lifespan — according to the brief, and more than half have “never undergone any major renovations” since they were built around the time of the Vietnam War.

The Biden administration has pumped a uniquely large amount of money into school infrastructure, according to experts who spoke with EdSurge, perhaps most well-known through ESSER funds in response to the pandemic. The issue of crumbling and outdated school buildings has generally been “orphaned” at the federal level, as one expert put it.

How Did School Infrastructure Get So Bad?

Much of the problem with U.S. school infrastructure is simply that it’s old, says Mary Filardo, executive director of 21st Century School Fund, who testified before Philadelphia's city council last year about the importance of modernizing school buildings.

Buildings that are part of “crumbling” school infrastructure were typically built in the ’70s, and meant to have a lifespan of about 50 years.

“There's a big push to build something, and then there is seldom the comparable funding on the operating side to appropriately maintain it,” Filardo says.

Filardo points out that schools built 50 years or more ago didn’t factor in the needs of modern teachers and students. They might have classrooms built with only one electrical outlet or kindergarten rooms without in-class bathrooms for those young students. ADA accessibility requirements didn’t exist until the ’90s.

“To the human credit, we've learned some things, and so now the standards that we have to meet are different, they're better, and we can create healthier and more educationally rich environments,” Filardo says. “But we don't actually have the system there to deliver it that well or support it, so we're doing catch-up.”

There are also millions more children in schools today than when many school buildings were constructed, Filardo says. That includes not only population growth, but the inclusion of children who used to be kept out of school altogether.

“In many ways, the public schools have taken on child social services,” Filardo says. “So that the social workers, the psychologists, the special education services are now provided in the public schools, and that's not where it used to happen. Kids were more institutionalized, they were not in school. It was really a different environment.”

Guy Bliesner, president of National Council on School Facilities, says that funding for school buildings has long been a local issue, with occasional support from the state. Many districts saw their student populations growing until the ’80s, and enrollment in rural districts was hit particularly hard as families moved to urban areas.

“Schools that were built to accommodate 200 to 250 students now have 70 students, and they can't afford the opportunity to rebuild the school because of the cost,” Bliesner says. “So they're stuck using a facility that was built in the ’50s or ’60s, trying to maintain it in an ongoing fashion, and serve the community that's there now.”

Brandon T. Payne, executive director of National Council on School Facilities and Bliesner’s colleague, says that school districts generally take on debt when building new facilities, but maintenance has to come from their operating budget. That means if the funds aren’t in the bank, those maintenance needs get deferred. And if the economy is down — i.e. sales or property taxes decrease — that means district budgets will get hit, too.

“We have a significant backlog of deferred maintenance nationally, things that we have put off doing because we had the more pressing need of educating the students,” Payne says.

Another issue is the quality of the structures. Bliesner says that buildings constructed in the ’30s through the ’50s were built with longevity in mind, and quality began to decrease in the ’60s.

“In early education, we built temples to education,” Bliesner says. “Now we build barns to teach in.”

Pushing for Lasting Solutions

Filardo says that the first time the federal government got heavily involved in funding school buildings was during the Great Depression, when it was looking to create jobs and stimulate construction businesses. Since then, she says it’s been the subject of an ideological battle in Congress. Republicans pushed back against investment in school buildings during the Great Recession, she recalls, though funds were ultimately made available through states. Another national crisis brought about ESSER and another wave of funding, for projects like improving school air filtration in the wake of COVID-19.

“Why it's been orphaned at the federal level has been a very odd ideological position,” Filardo says. “As you can see, the Republicans would say, ‘Abolish the Department of Education altogether.’ It's the craziest thing that somehow knowledge generation, education, and all of the social benefits of public schooling would be [framed] like, ‘Oh, no, no, that's not really not our business.’”

While rural areas have lost students, that doesn’t necessarily mean the urban areas they move to are seeing gains in their budgets as the enrollment increases, Bliesner says. That’s because those districts have to build more facilities to accommodate more students, ballooning maintenance expenses at the same time.

There’s not just one cause of the country’s school maintenance backlog, Bliesner says, but a confluence of challenges including student migration, economic downturns that make local governments hesitant to increase taxes on residents, and the use of maintenance funds to support instruction during budget squeezes.

“It's kind of a perfect storm of multiple things that have created the situation,” Bliesner says.

Payne says that over the 50-year lifespan of a school building, a litany of factors that affect funding will change — including the priorities of officials who control the purse strings.

Ultimately, he believes school districts need a steady funding source to tackle the maintenance backlog that is decades in the making by the time a facility no longer meets the needs of educators and students.

“If you tie that into elections, you're talking about the opportunity of having 12 different presidents, or eight different sets of Senate elections, or 24 House of Representative elections,” Payne says. “That's why really it's got to become something that is a sustainable revenue stream that's coming in, and there's reticence on the federal side to engage themselves in an activity that traditionally has not been theirs, that is truly local.”

Designing for the Future

That is what DC Public Schools seems to have figured out. At John Lewis Elementary, assistant principal Milton Bryant points out the features that were planned out not just by district officials but during meetings with the community around the school. The artwork on the walls was done by local artists, he says, and it’s the first campus in the district to have net-zero emissions — meaning it runs only on renewable energy.

“We have the water works room where kids can go and see how water is filtered throughout the building,” Bryant says. “We have the [SMART] board, as soon as you walk in, so you can actually go through the science of how the building works.”

The district has 13 school modernization projects currently underway, including one campus with areas that were built in the ’30s, that are funded through the municipal budget. It’s the job of design teams to take into account what the community wants and get that reflected in the modernized schools, Ferebee says. Sustainability, for instance, was important to the community around John Lewis Elementary.

“Each footprint of the building is very unique, and the design team really gets started early helping the school community think through some of the features that are important to that particular school community for teaching and learning,” Ferebee says. “A lot of our schools recently have [wanted] outdoor meeting spaces, like an outdoor amphitheater or a place for the school community to gather to have lunch or show a movie. All those things are baked into design, and the courses aligned to that particular footprint at that school.”

When Filardo spoke to the Philadelphia City Council (not the school board) about school modernization last year, she spoke about bravery.

She says that school districts tend to want to go to the community with the answers already in hand, but it takes bravery to present a complex problem and ask the public to help find the solution.

When her own children were in elementary school, Filardo recalls parents in the community — a 50/50 mix of white families and recently arrived refugees from El Salvador — worked together to decide what they wanted in place of the crumbling campus in their Washington, D.C., neighborhood. While her kids never got to attend the renovated school, or any modernized school during their K-12 years, her grandchildren did.

“It was tapping into that sense of, ‘We actually can have agency in the future,’” Filardo says. “We're not just responding to and reacting to the past, and that's where I'm saying to do that, you got to be brave. You can't shy away from big problems and tension in the room, you gotta wrestle with it.”