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A tidal wave of school construction is
rolling across the nation.
California voters on March 2 approved $12
billion -- on top of $22 billion already voted in the past
five years -- for new and refurbished schools. New Jersey
is in the midst of a $12.3 billion school construction program,
largest in its history. Ohio has a four-year, $10.5 billion
program. A new Maryland study asserts that $2.85 billion in
repairs and replacements are needed.
These multi-billions will doubtless do real
good. Millions of kids will be rescued from outdated, crowded,
sometimes filthy or dilapidated school settings. And there
should be a real dollars-and-cents benefit, Jonathan Weiss,
a former member of Vice President Al Gore’s staff, concludes
in a KnowledgeWorks Foundation research report -- “Can
Public Schools Impact Economic Development?” -- scheduled
for release later this month.
Modernized schools, notes Weiss, often trigger higher student
achievement -- especially critical for America’s increasingly
technology-based economy. New and refurbished schools tend
to raise local property values. They help revitalize depressed
neighborhoods. Businesses are drawn to places with quality
schools.
Still, it’s easy to envision dollar
signs dancing in the eyes of the bond houses, school boards,
architects, building contractors and asphalt layers as the
new construction wave gains momentum. And some troublesome
questions are surfacing: Are new schools being built where
they should be? Are too many serviceable older schools --
and the downtowns and neighborhoods they stand in -- being
abandoned? Are we building the right size of school for best
student achievement? Is creative architecture going into the
new schools? Or are too many new schools, as Steven Litt writes
in the (Cleveland) Plain Dealer, being designed and built
with “a homogenized blandness” that recalls the
country’s blizzard of chain restaurants, drugstores and
strip shopping centers?
Governing magazine leaps into the location
controversy with a March cover story -- “Edge-ucation:
the compulsion to build schools in the middle of nowhere.”
As a prime example, Governing cites a 3,000
student high school built four years ago in Mount Pleasant,
S.C., a Charleston suburb. The school was constructed outside
walking distance of any of its students. The land was donated
by developers who figured the school would trigger demand--
and indeed it has begun to impact the 2,000 surrounding acres.
One critic predicts “a big-box nightmare hell.”
Faulty research, Governing’s Rob Gurwitt
notes, has forced many communities to abandon, rather than
refurbish, older, in-town schools that undergird their downtowns
and neighborhoods. School boards have blindly accepted an
unsubstantiated claim, printed in American School and University
magazine a half century ago, that if the price to renovate
an older school is more than half of the cost of building
new, school districts should swallow the extra expense and
build new.
A counterrevolution appears underway. In
South Carolina, Republican Gov. Mark Sanford last year seized
on a report by the South Carolina Coastal Conservation League
showing how school sprawl was making it far more difficult
for children to walk to school. Sanford, in his State of the
State address, attacked the “construction of massive,
isolated schools.” With a bipartisan legislative group,
he got a bill passed to overturn state law requiring that
new schools sit on large lots.
Michigan has just produced the most thoroughly
researched -- and stinging -- indictment of school building
practices anywhere (http://mlui.org/downloads/hardlessons.pdf).
Its authors are an unusual pair: the Michigan Land Use Institute,
a smart growth advocacy organization, and the state’s
Chamber of Commerce.
They found new school construction has raised
Michigan’s property taxes and tripled related debt from
$4 billion to $12 billion since 1994. Since 1996, school districts
have built 500 new schools and closed 278 older ones, though
school population has grown just 4.5 percent. Every new school
they analyzed had cost more than renovating an older one.
All this is negative for existing communities and Michigan’s
economic competitiveness, the Chamber and Land Use Institute
concluded. So reverse course, they urge: first, try to renovate
existing schools; second, construct them in existing neighborhoods;
only as a last resort build schools in farm fields.
The report also argues that school building
decisions should be integrated with local land use planning.
What that means is revoking the power school boards have exercised
across the nation -- choosing school sites as they please,
no matter how adverse their decisions may be to neighborhoods
and downtowns, or to a community’s overall growth priorities.
Curbing school boards’ power is bound
to be a political battle -- and so far it’s erupted in
only a few states. But there’s an old truism -- institutions
rarely reform voluntarily. In an era of fiscal stringency,
with an alliance of forces for reduced state spending and
for community-sensitive, anti-sprawl planning, perhaps it’s
not too much to hope that change is finally on the wing.
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