Our public school districts are stretched thin and the pressures facing them are mounting. By the numbers, the last three State of Our Schools publications (2016, 2020, 2026 – 21st Century Fund) estimates that between 2016-2026 public K–12 enrollment fell 1%, the gross square footage of our nation’s school buildings grew 15%, construction cost per square foot rose 90%, and the annual gap between what districts need to maintain their facilities and what they can actually fund increased by over 260%. Per student, that shortfall widened from about $785 a year to nearly $2,900. These estimates show what most Districts I know have sensed: they are spending more on facilities while falling further behind on maintaining them. The inevitable result is fewer resources for kids, in worsening environments. That is the case for planning differently, and it is the case for this essay.
Logic would tell us that if District A was designed for a peak enrollment of 40,000 students 20 years ago and now serves 30,000 while the cost per student to educate and per square foot to maintain has increased dramatically and building needs have also increased over time as their buildings aged, then the District should consolidate to a smaller portfolio to find its financial equilibrium. Only by finding that equilibrium can it afford to offer its students the level of service they need (a) in a building where roofs, HVAC, MEP, and interior systems are renovated or replaced at the end of their useful lives (b).
But this does not happen for three main reasons: well-intentioned beliefs about school consolidation along with the two most ubiquitous of human temptations: money and politics.
Beliefs, Money & Politics
If you Google research school consolidations or closures you will find conclusions that most of the time, consolidations don’t save districts money, and they harm kids and communities. What I believe this research teaches us is that it is very possible to close schools without reducing staff positions and operational costs and therefore create no savings that could otherwise be reinvested in improving the student experience. In short, it is possible to execute a consolidation plan poorly. What you don’t find is research on the harm done to students in a district with chronically declining enrollments (and thus revenues) and increasing costs per student where they do not find a way to cut costs.
I have yet to meet superintendents or board members who are eager to consolidate schools, but I meet plenty who are left having to balance their budgets while looking to their state’s legislatures and seeing only decreasing revenues in their future, all while hearing from their teachers about the increasing needs of students beyond simply reading, writing, and arithmetic. What these leaders need is research and guidance for how to shrink their portfolio so that they can invest more per student rather than being told it is morally wrong and practically harmful to operate fewer schools than they currently do.
There comes a point where it is morally wrong—and practically harmful—to not adjust your operations when you are serving a far smaller population than you were designed for. Furthermore, ribbon-cutting ceremonies win elections for board members while driving profits and prestige for the design community. Consolidations have historically done the opposite. Political and financial pressures have incentivized district boards and leaders to defer tough decisions until they become “someone else’s problem.” For many leaders today, they are now that someone else.
The Test of a Good Plan
A good Facility Master Plan or Long-Range Facility Plan passes three tests: adequacy, affordability, and accessibility.
- Adequacy means every student gets clean air, clean spaces, enough room for varied instruction, and, most importantly, enough caring, competent adults to teach and support them.
- Affordable means the plan has reasonable financial logic: a District can staff and maintain what it builds, not just build it.
- Accessible means every community has real access to these schools of adequate condition and resources.
To create a viable plan, consultant teams and districts must define their vision and their constraints. Key to visioning is the ‘day in the life’ experience the district desires for its student, then translating their vision to a staffing model that would provide that experience for students and facility conditions supporting it. The cost to operate a school at this model for 1, 2, 3, 4 or more cohorts of students divided by the base state/local funding per student provides you with a Minimum Viable Enrollment (MVE) for each grade level needed to sustain that staffing model and thus that desired level of service. A building’s capacity therefore becomes part of the planning discussion, while adding MVE changes the focus from “how many students can my building hold?” to “how many students are needed per school to afford the level of service I want to offer my students?”
Additionally, the cost to repair a building versus replacing it (a Facility Condition Index, or FCI) informs whether continued maintenance and capital renewals or renovation/replacement is the best long-term investment. Generally speaking, when the cost to address the identified needs of a building over a 5–10 year period exceeds 50% of the building’s replacement value, renovation or replacement begins to make more financial sense. With the cost of a major renovation (to the studs) of a building generally costing approximately 75% of the cost of new construction, however, make sure that the building has the classroom types, sizes, and arrangements you believe will serve kids well for the next 20+ years before investing that much in renovations rather than spending 20–25% more for a new building.
Central to this question of educational adequacy is classroom size; if a substantial percentage of a building’s classrooms are so small that they force lecture-based instruction, then ask yourself if that is what you want to perpetuate. As a rule, classrooms smaller than 700 SF are simply too small for classes of 22 or more students to do much more than sit in rows.
Finally, once you have your building capacities, MVE models, FCIs, and classroom sizes, you want to consider which buildings to build, renovate, replace, or consolidate in light of your unique geography and where people live. Mid- to large districts often serve regions built in different eras with different building needs, capacities, enrollments, and population densities. Tailor facility strategies to each region’s data and needs.
Five Good Practices
There are five steps to follow when creating an FMP/LRFP that can help you create a plan that provides every student equitable access to a well-resourced school in good condition:
- Start with data. Good planning is built on good data, drives towards desired outcomes, and explicitly works within your budgetary constraints. A plan that doesn’t work with your budgets is just a wish list, and a plan that doesn’t aim towards your vision will not improve the student experience.
- Define viable enrollment ranges. Without an MVE, “under-utilized” and “over-utilized” are only partially helpful. With one, the District can answer the question that really matters: what positions us to best serve our students?
- Set cut-points. Combine FCI, age, adequacy, and capacity into a decision matrix. Create a target condition and utilization ranges, while simultaneously considering MVE and facility adequacy. The clearest direction for a facility plan emerges when you overlap these datasets rather than considering them separately (or not at all).
- Test plans against affordability. A plan that cannot be staffed and maintained is not a plan. The question is not whether a District can afford to build something. It is whether the resulting portfolio directs resources to kids in classrooms — or dilutes them.
- Engage before you recommend. Each school community has a voice. Your responsibility is to make sure that voice becomes informed with the hard truths and rigorous commitments in front of it. Don’t present the plan cold to the Board. Build it with stakeholders as co-planners.
The Fundamental Commitment
All of this is in service of one question: does every child in my District have equitable access to a comfortable, safe, and sufficiently resourced school at every level of their educational career? A Facilities Master Plan exists to answer that question honestly: built on data, driving toward a vision, created with community, and fiscally sound.
The charge for anyone writing an FMP/LRFP today is simple, despite the context being complex. Create a plan that provides adequately staffed and resourced schools, at capital and operating costs you can afford with every family having equitable access to these high-quality schools. For many districts, this means the numbers, locations, sizes, and/or configurations of some schools need to change. When navigating this change, seek to maximize the effective, direct investments in students while identifying and cutting costs that prevent you from doing so. For districts in chronic decline, the goal is to create a portfolio of schools that is Newer, Fewer, Stronger. LBD