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Ground water flooding and a failing steam heat boiler are
just a few of the many challenges Atchison County Community Schools USD
377 custodian Dan Coder faces in Effingham, Kan Credit: Dave Kaup for
The Hechinger Report
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The Hechinger Report
Rundown schools forced more students to go remote
Government refused to fund crumbling schools for years. Now the neglect has locked children out of learning.
By Bracey Harris, Meredith Kolodner and Neal Morton
November 25, 2020
Yvette Alston-Johnson was seething when she got the news. Children in
Paterson, New Jersey would not be allowed to go to school in person
this fall, while many of their peers in predominantly white and
affluent suburbs would return.
Alston-Johnson attended Paterson public schools, as did her five
children, and she has watched the buildings fall steadily into
disrepair over the years. She is now the primary caregiver for her
grandson Rayahn, who is in eighth grade at the Dr. Martin Luther King,
Jr. Educational Complex, where close to 90 percent of students are
Black or Latino.
“I feel like we get the short end of the stick,” said Alston-Johnson,
who is 54. “We’re always last in line when it comes to our schools and
money.”
“It’s cold in those buildings in the winter and then the A.C. doesn’t
work in the summer; there’s mice running around,” she added. “If they
did more upkeep on the buildings, the teachers would have been able to
teach them in the buildings.”
Paterson, which serves mostly low-income families, has struggled to
find the money to repair its buildings. In 2016, New Jersey allowed
historically underfunded districts to submit requests for health and
safety improvements. Paterson asked for ventilation repairs in 11
buildings, but all their requests were denied. In fact, of the roughly
90 applications to fix unsafe heating or air conditioning and
ventilation systems, just two were approved by the state.
Now, the rampant spread of the coronavirus has exposed a crisis of
crumbling and dilapidated school buildings brought on by decades of
underfunding and neglect in New Jersey and across the country. The
consequences are especially dire for Black and Latino children and for
low-income children of all races. Schools serving these students were
much more likely to remain closed this fall, in part because, during
the pandemic, old buildings were deemed unsafe for both children and
teachers. The fallout has left families scrambling for child care and
students struggling to keep up with remote learning.
Nationally, school closures forced 41 percent of districts with a high
concentration of students living in poverty into offering remote-only
instruction this fall, while 24 percent of districts with a low
concentration of students living in poverty kept their doors closed to
in-person instruction, according to a report by the Center on
Reinventing Public Education.
States have no reason to be surprised by the sharp divide in children’s
access to their schools. More than 40 percent of school districts need
to update or replace their ventilation systems in at least half of
their schools, according to a report by the Government Accounting
Office. Moreover, low-poverty districts spent about $1 billion more on
school construction than high-poverty districts in 2016, which comes to
41 percent more per student.
“There was evidence about the inequalities in school facilities
before Covid,” said Diana Quintero, a senior research analyst with the
Brown Center on Education Policy at the Brookings Institution. Most
money for improvements is raised locally, she said, “so schools serving
disadvantaged students get less funding to make improvements.”
“Now we are just seeing more of those inequalities that we know existed before,” Quintero said.
Across the U.S., funding for K-12 facilities remains “inherently and
persistently inequitable,” according to a 2016 report. The report, a
collaboration between nonprofits the 21st Century School Fund, the U.S.
Green Building Council and the National Council on School Facilities,
found the federal government offers “almost nothing” to address the
inequities in school construction. A dozen states similarly provide no
direct support to help local school districts maintain their facilities
or build new ones.
This fall, New Jersey left the decision of whether to offer in-person
classes or remain remote to individual districts, and the results fell
sharply along racial lines. As of early October, 6 out of 10 students
in schools that began the year with remote-only classes were Black or
Latino, while just 3 of 10 were white.
Spending levels also tracked with which children had to stay home. The
state’s school funding formula sets a dollar amount each district needs
to provide “an adequate education.” The majority of districts that the
state says are underfunded by more than $5,000 per student were
offering no in-person learning, according to analysis by Mark Weber at
New Jersey Policy Perspective.
“Even if you brought those districts up to adequate funding for one
year, the facilities can’t be fixed in that year because of years,
sometimes decades of neglect,” Weber said.
Alston-Johnson, sitting in her home in Paterson, said it didn’t
surprise her to learn that more of the wealthier districts are offering
in-person learning.
“There’s who’s got money and there’s segregation. All of the kids need
to have at least one or two days in the buildings,” she said. “The
biggest loss is that people in upper-income neighborhoods are ahead,
more ahead now. It’s just going to widen the gap.”
In South Carolina, maintenance workers in Dillon School District Four
try to mask water-damage by gluing plywood to classroom walls. Five
generations of children have passed through the doors of the district’s
oldest campus, East Elementary, constructed in 1926. If taxes aren’t
raised for a new grade school, it’s possible a sixth generation of
learners will attend the school too.
In communities like Dillon County, raising sales or property taxes
might be too much to ask. Nearly 34 percent of residents live in
poverty. The county was once known for booming textile and tobacco
industries that have long since declined. Now, some of the more
promising manufacturing work is more than 100 miles away, and median
household income is just under $30,000.
Superintendent Ray Rogers is reluctant to ask families who struggle to
make ends meet to pay more taxes on clothes and other goods to fix
ailing school facilities. But short of receiving a windfall of state or
federal aid, he may not have a choice.
Rogers said he is especially frustrated when he sees public schools in
the affluent enclaves of the state that rival college facilities.
“We don’t have revenue for something like that,” he said. He doesn’t
begrudge districts with state-of-the-art buildings, he said, “I just
wish we could do better.”
Across the United States, funding for education is largely a local
endeavor. Many districts with bustling main streets and abundant
resources can erect gleaming modern facilities, while districts with
boarded-up storefronts and with little property wealth have little to
nothing set aside to patch up crumbling infrastructure. From classrooms
without air conditioning in Baltimore to deteriorating-facilities in
the Mississippi Delta, school infrastructure often follows the pattern
of the nation’s most entrenched inequalities, intertwining closely with
race and wealth.
In South Carolina, Dillon Four might be one of the furthest behind. The
district, where almost three-fourths of students are of color and 90
percent live below the poverty level, is projected to receive less
local funding per student than any other non-charter district in the
state this year. The figure excludes the amount the district spends on
maintenance, but it’s an indicator of how the district struggles to
cover the basics. And when it comes to a 94-year-old elementary school,
ingenuity and dedication can only go so far.
The last time a bond referendum passed was in 2007. It was an
exception: Since 2000, 29 school bonds have failed in South Carolina.
Even when voters agree to tax hikes, disparities among local economies
mean their efforts may not be enough to cover the cost of upgrading
school buildings.
“As long as you have districts with low property values that don’t have
much industry located in that area, clearly, they’re always going to be
playing catch up,” said South Carolina state Rep. Russell Ott, a
Democrat.
For decades, families across the country with the lowest incomes and
families of color have sent their children into buildings where
bathrooms are in disrepair and ventilation is poor. For these children,
going to school was a precarious endeavor, even before the pandemic.
They were more likely to be in poorly ventilated classrooms, swelter in
extreme heat and shiver in the cold. Toxin exposure in aging structures
put their health at risk.
Now, families wonder how they can trust that their children will be
kept safe in these same conditions as a deadly virus rages unchecked.
This fall Dillon Four reopened with a hybrid teaching model: Students
are split into groups and alternate the days they come to campus with
days they stay home to complete lessons on their own. Despite this
alternative, 60 percent of the district’s families opted to keep their
children fully online.
Short of an infusion of funding and time for building upgrades, Rogers,
the superintendent, said allowing uncomfortable parents to keep their
children to stay at home was the best the district could offer. “We
didn’t try to force anyone to come in,” he said.
In classrooms where windows work, teachers try to follow CDC guidance
to open windows and circulate fresh air. But years of wear has made
doing so a challenge.
“You push them up — you might not get them down,” Rogers said.
In early March, just a week before most states shuttered their schools
to slow the spread of coronavirus, Rebecca Garcia boarded a plane to
Washington, D.C.
Garcia, the president of the Nevada PTA, spent two days on Capitol Hill
meeting with lawmakers to lobby for more spending on K-12
infrastructure, as proposed in the federal Rebuild America’s Schools
Act. The legislation, which has remained on the House floor since last
year, would prioritize $100 billion for high-poverty schools to improve
the health and safety of their facilities.
Garcia said the pandemic has only hastened the need for that money.
“People don’t realize how many of the issues related to reopening
schools go back to decades of financial management choices made in
public education,” Garcia said. “Whether it’s school maintenance and
repairing A.C. filters, but also class sizes and portables … Even if we
could space everyone out, where are they going to safely teach? We have
not invested in the infrastructure.”
Back in Las Vegas, where Garcia’s children go to school, leaders have
faced different problems than their peers in smaller, more rural
places, but they’re no less daunting.
Since the 1980s, Clark County, which encompasses Las Vegas, swelled
from the nation’s 18th-largest school district to the fifth-largest by
last year. The district had to pour most of its capital budget into
building schools to house the surge of students. Older schools,
meanwhile, languished in the desert heat.
Now, the district estimates it needs to spend at least $5.4 billion to
fix the roofs, replace HVAC systems and keep its aging campuses up and
running. The school board in 2015 approved a 10-year plan to issue
about $4 billion in new debt for all facility needs — but only about $1
billion of that will go toward renovating or updating schools. (The
other $3 billion will pay for building new schools, adding space on
overcrowded campuses and entirely replacing older facilities.)
About 3 in 4 students in Clark County qualify for subsidized meals at
school, and a similar share identify as children of color. With the
exception of students at a few rural schools, none will return to
physical classes until January, at the earliest.
Jeff Wagner, the district’s chief of facilities, acknowledged that
deferred maintenance — specifically, concerns about air quality —
played a part in the district’s decision to delay its reopening. “It
certainly was a consideration. It wasn’t the mitigating factor,” Wagner
said. Still, he added, “the thing that keeps me up most at night are
those older facilities.”
Since March, the district has changed the air filters in every building
and increased the intake of outdoor air into classrooms. But at the top
of Wagner’s wish list is to have the money — and time — to install
working sinks at every school to encourage hand-washing during the
pandemic.
Plumbing regularly fails at Von Tobel Middle School, a high-poverty
campus that the district found needs nearly $30 million in renovations.
The school relies on an “excessive” number of portable classrooms to
absorb over-enrollment, and HVAC issues are a recurring problem.
Still, parent Daisy Larez hoped her two sons can return to the school in person soon.
“They’re so tired of staying home and looking at computers,” Larez
said. One of her sons told her, “This is stupid. This isn’t teaching us
anything. This is just giving us busy work.”
Larez attended Von Tobel herself and recalled its shoddy conditions 20
years ago. But she worried her children’s academics were slipping with
each day spent away from campus.
“They’re not actually paying attention to what the teachers are saying”
online, Larez said. “My boys are straight-A students. I don’t feel like
they’re learning anything new.”
In June, Democrats in the U.S. House of Representatives reintroduced
and passed a version of the Rebuild America’s Schools Act as part of a
larger $1.5 trillion package, which has stalled in the
Republican-controlled Senate. The money, Garcia said, would be critical
in Nevada — one of the dozen states that currently provide no money for
school facilities.
“Every dollar makes such a huge difference,” she said.
Without federal leadership, it’s unclear how and even whether
individual states can make safer schools a priority as many state
budgets buckle under the ongoing recession and ever-growing costs of a
public health emergency.
In Colorado, the state has a matching program for costly construction
and renovation projects. The Colorado Springs School District 11
received about $1 million to replace the water lines at one high
school, but still has a backlog of about $700 million in maintenance
needs. Nine out of 52 schools there have no central air system — a
critical component for increasing the turnover of fresh air so
necessary during an airborne pandemic — and virtually no schools have
new enough equipment to meet federally recommended levels for air
filtration, said Glenn Gustafson, deputy superintendent and chief
financial officer in Colorado Springs.
“We had challenges with our HVAC systems long before the pandemic, and
so (the coronavirus) just put the spotlight on it,” said Gustafson.
The district only sets aside $1 million each year to keep up its aging
facilities, Gustafson said. Between July and September, to keep
students safe from Covid-19, the district spent about $400,000 of that
reserve on ventilation issues alone.
In Colorado Springs, about half of students identify as children of
color, and a similar share come from low-income households. High
schoolers didn’t return to campus until October — more than a month
after their peers in neighboring Cheyenne Mountain School District 12,
where 69 percent of students are white and the median household income
is nearly twice that of Colorado Springs.
“Generally speaking, school districts are on their own,” Gustafson said.
In Alabama, lawmakers approved a one-time infusion for school
construction projects and repairs this summer. Montgomery Schools, a
29,500-student district that averages anywhere from 300 to 500
maintenance requests per week, will receive $32 million in funding for
facility projects.
It’s a help. But the district has more $200 million in deferred
maintenance, including replacing floors, installing new roofs, and
addressing other capital needs in buildings constructed before the
Great Depression.
Director of Operations Chad Anderson said the task is overwhelming. For
years, Montgomery residents paid the minimum property tax rate — about
$100 per year on a $100,000 home. “A $3 million budget doesn’t help us
very much, when you have 60-plus buildings,” Anderson said.
In November, voters agreed to double the district’s property rate. The
increase will bring the district closer to the average property rate in
the state, but the tax hike won’t start until 2023.
Families in districts that can’t raise enough money on their own for
school buildings often have two options: lobby their legislators to
spend more, or sue elected officials in an attempt to force them to do
so. In South Carolina, 40 districts including Dillon Two, now part of
the consolidated Dillon Four, sued.
In 2014, the state Supreme Court agreed with the plaintiffs that South
Carolina had failed to provide “minimally adequate schools” for all
students. But the victory was short-lived; justices dismissed the suit
three years later. Though short of their hopes, the plaintiffs received
some aid. In the months leading up to the court’s final ruling, state
legislators agreed to direct $56 million toward ailing facilities.
Dillon Four received about $1.2 million from the state for needed
repairs.
California is perhaps the only state investing a large pot of money to
help struggling districts address air quality in schools. Roughly 85
percent of classrooms in the Golden State lack proper ventilation,
researchers at University of California Davis found late last year.
Assembly Bill 841, which passed in September, will provide upwards of
$600 million specifically to upgrade HVAC systems in public schools,
prioritizing those in underserved communities.
“I have yet to see another state that has been doing this,” said Jeff
Vincent, a director and cofounder of the Center for Cities and Schools
at the University of California Berkeley.
“The condition in too many schools was bad and doing harm prior to the
pandemic,” he added. “The pandemic has shined a spotlight on that …
These problems don’t go away when a vaccine comes.”
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