Infrastructure & School Operations

As a presidential candidate, Republican Donald Trump promised that if elected in 2024, one of his early priorities would be "closing up" the U.S. Department of Education and sending "all education and education work and needs back to the states."

Trump, who indeed became president-elect after defeating Vice President Kamala Harris, has a long road ahead to gain congressional approval to close the Education Department. But he's likely to make more immediate finance and policy changes at the department by creating and rescinding executive orders and through his budget requests to a Republican Congress.

Proposals to eliminate the Education Department are nothing new, with members of Congress routinely putting forth such bills for at least the last three congressional sessions — but the legislation has never gotten far.

Several education-focused organizations are tempering their reactions until a formal proposal is made.

In a Nov. 8 post by AASA, The School Superintendents Association, Sasha Pudelski, the organization's director of advocacy, said, "AASA urges superintendents to maintain a healthy sense of skepticism" regarding closure of the Education Department. 

Still, AASA and other education-related organizations said there are budgeting areas to focus on now and as more details from the incoming Trump administration are revealed. Trump will be inaugurated on Jan. 20, 2025.

Though fiscal year 2025 began Oct. 1, Congress has yet to finalize its spending levels, and the Education Department along with other federal agencies are operating under a continuing resolution that expires Dec. 20. Meanwhile, the Trump administration will propose a FY 2026 budget early next year. 

Trump, in his first administration from 2017-2021, sought federal education spending cuts to Title I, the Office for Civil Rights, state grants to improve teacher quality,  and 21st Century Community Learning Centers. At the same time, he sought more money for career and technical education as well as public and private school choice.

Federal education funding represents just about 14% of total K-12 spending in 2024, with the rest provided by local and state governments and other sources. Still, education experts say federal investments are important for supporting funding equity and accountability. According to research and advocacy group EdTrust, some state and local funding formulas and programs provide more money to high-income school districts than to low-income districts.

And with schools still needing to focus on COVID-19 learning loss, any federal funding cuts are worrisome, said public school advocates.

Here are four education funding areas to watch under the next Trump administration:

State grants

In a 2023 video on his YouTube channel, Trump said he would send "all education and education work and needs back to the states. We want them to run the education of our children," because the states "will do a much better job of it."

Such a move would align with Republicans’ goals to reduce federal regulations and bureaucracy. Currently, the federal government makes grants for specific programs to states, which must follow certain conditions —including monitoring, reporting and administering student assessments — to receive and spend that funding. 

The two largest grant programs are Title I for low-income school districts and Part B of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act for special education services. These two funding programs pre-dated the creation of the Education Department in 1979, education funding experts point out.

If federal education funding went directly to states without accountability measures, state leaders would have more flexibility to make fiscal decisions. But that could result in vastly different K-12 experiences for students depending where they live.

School choice

Trump and GOP members of Congress have promoted the expansion of school choice initiatives, including taxpayer funding to support private school tuition. State-level private school choice efforts have increased in recent years with enrollment in such programs exceeding 1 million nationwide, according to data analyzed by pro-school choice advocacy group EdChoice earlier this year.

Trump's campaign platform vowed to support universal school choice, expand 529 education savings accounts and treat homeschooling families equally. It did not, however, offer details on how to accomplish this.

Project 2025, a blueprint for a second Trump administration written by conservative research and policy organization The Heritage Foundation, calls for taxpayer-funded school choice options for students attending schools in Washington, D.C., students in active-duty military families, and students attending schools on tribal lands. Trump disavowed Project 2025 while campaigning. 

Public school advocates argue that private school choice programs do not improve student academic outcomes and siphon money away from public schools, which educate most school-aged children.

Special education

Project 2025 recommends that most funding for IDEA be converted into a "no-strings formula block grant" used for educating students with disabilities. Those funds should be distributed directly to districts through the U.S. Department of Health and Human Service’s Administration for Community Living, the document says.

During the first Trump administration, then-Education Secretary Betsy DeVos defended budget proposals to cut IDEA. Those plans brought multiple failed attempts to eliminate funding for Special Olympics, a school and community-based program that promotes social and sports participation for people with disabilities.

Public school, special education and disability rights advocates point out that Congress has a long track record of bipartisan support for IDEA services for students with disabilities. However, they also note that Congress has never come close to meeting the pledge it made in 1975 for "full funding" of IDEA, or 40% of the additional per-pupil cost for providing special education services.

For fiscal 2025, IDEA federal support will be just above 10%, said Kuna Tavalin, senior advisor for policy and advocacy for the Council for Exceptional Children, a nonprofit professional organization for special educators.

"Our message to Congress is and has been for a really long time, ‘Fund it so that we can do a better job’ — not we as individual members, but as a field, as a system," Tavalin said.

Curriculum

Although long-standing Education Department policy is to leave curriculum decisions up to the state and local governments, the federal agency — through grants and policy — can influence what lessons in schools are or are not emphasized.

Trump's campaign platform pledges to "ensure children are taught fundamentals like Reading, History, Science, and Math, not Leftwing propaganda." It also promises to "defund schools that engage in inappropriate political indoctrination of our children using Federal Taxpayer Dollars."

Although the platform doesn't offer more details, it is likely referring to state-level censorship debates about books and curricula that feature LGBTQ+ characters or cover sex and sex-related topics.

Additionally, Trump has vowed to cut federal funding for schools that push "inappropriate racial, sexual, or political content on our children." Instead, his administration would support the teaching of America's founding and western civilization. 

Career and technical education — a K-12 issue that has bipartisan support — may likely see funding increases under the incoming administration, with Trump promoting project-based learning, work experiences and career training programs.

WASHINGTON — Educators, researchers, advocates, parents and attorneys told the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights on Nov. 15 that a shortage of special education teachers is hurting the academic growth and due process rights of students with disabilities.

To remedy the problem, the speakers offered a wide variety of solutions, including raising teacher salaries, increasing class sizes, reducing compliance tasks, offering more school choice, and investing in teacher career pipelines. The all-day briefing on special education teacher shortages featured 22 panelists who provided testimony and answered questions from the eight-member bipartisan commission.

The commission is studying the issue and plans to publish an Annual Statutory Enforcement Report on it in the second half of 2025. Those findings and recommendations will be shared with the president and Congress. President-elect Donald Trump has vowed to close the U.S. Department of Education, which oversees federal special education funding and programs.

Some panelists at the session shared how the COVID-19 pandemic exacerbated longtime, persistent special education teacher shortages. Others said that while there are pockets of shortages across the country, they doubt there's a generalized national crisis.

About 70% of surveyed schools reported special education teacher vacancies in the 2023-24 school year, according to a National Center for Education Statistics report. 

The Council for Exceptional Children and the Council of Administrators of Special Education, say about half of special education teachers leave the profession within the first five years of teaching.

The shortage of special education teachers — as well as special education professionals and support staff such as speech-language pathologists, behavior specialists and paraprofessionals — means "students are not able to access critical services in a timely way, directly affecting their educational and social development," said Jessica Tang, president of the Massachusetts chapter of the American Federation of Teachers.  

But Max Eden, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative-leaning think tank, said the number of special educators over the past two decades has increased by 59%, while the special education population has grown by only 16%.

"That's four new special ed teachers for every one new special ed student. Rationally, we have never had less of a special ed teacher shortage," Eden said.

Salary struggles

Several of the panelists recommended more funding under the federal Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, as well as state and local investments, to support higher wages for special educators. They pointed out that these teachers face more paperwork demands and training requirements than their general education counterparts. 

"​​We're talking about teachers in ways that cause them not to feel as valued, because perhaps the teacher salary scale is still in the '50s, so shame on us when it should be far above that across this nation," said Tiffany Anderson, superintendent of Topeka Public Schools in Kansas.

Eric Hannushek, the Paul and Jean Hanna senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, said teacher salary increases should be directed to high-quality educators in specialized areas. 

"Let's just give overall, across the board, salary increases," Hannushek said sarcastically. "That will do nothing. That will do absolutely nothing. You have to, in fact, pay for where the scarcity is."

To help recruit and retain special educators, districts also need to provide benefits like student loan forgiveness, along with apprenticeships, better working conditions, opportunities for professional growth, and mentoring, panelists suggested. 

Speaking specifically of student loan forgiveness programs, Tang said, "I have met dozens and dozens of teachers who say it's been life-changing."  

When schools can't fill special educator vacancies, they often have to hire inexperienced people with emergency or provisional teaching licenses, said Terita Gusby, CEO and founder of Education Prescriptions, a virtual tutoring company for students with disabilities. Those temporary teachers are more likely to be underqualified and leave the profession early, Gusby said.

"Addressing the teacher shortage is part of a multifaceted approach," Gusby said.  "We need to recognize that teaching is a profession and not just a job, and it should be created and treated with the respect and compensation that it deserves."

More options

Some panelists suggested that expanding private school choice options could help alleviate teacher shortages in public schools and better serve students with disabilities. 

"The population of children with special needs is diverse, and the spectrum of needs necessitates skilled, dedicated educators for students along with a variety of learning options" that families can choose, said Jonathan Butcher, senior research fellow at The Heritage Foundation, a conservative nonprofit that advocates for individual freedoms and limited government. The Heritage Foundation developed the controversial Project 2025, a guide for the next presidential administration to limit the role of the federal government.

Butcher said families with children with disabilities want alternatives to public schools in part because of disputes between families and school systems over individualized services. State education savings accounts created from taxpayer dollars could help families pay for therapies, tutors, private school tuition, online classes and more, said Butcher.

Yet Dan Stewart, managing attorney for education and employment at the National Disability Rights Network, said private school vouchers only give the "illusion of access" because private schools aren't required to educate students with disabilities. The network is a nonprofit group that advocates for people with disabilities.

Jessica Levin, litigation director with the nonprofit Education Law Center,  said private school vouchers are harmful to special education programs, because private schools aren't held to the same accountability measures as public schools. 

"We must vigorously protect their [students with disabilities] legal rights under IDEA and other key laws and ensure schools have sufficient resources to fulfill those rights. Vouchers actively work against both these goals," Levin said.

"Voucher programs leave public schools, which are the cornerstone of our democracy, with even fewer resources to serve a higher-need student population," Levin added.

The special educator role could become more attractive if legal compliance duties, paperwork and meetings could be lessened, said William Trachman, general counsel for Mountain States Legal Foundation and former deputy assistant secretary in the U.S. Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights. 

"More focus is needed on maximizing the amount of time that a teacher can spend with a student, and more time is needed on improving morale, because when teachers talk about the heavy burdens associated with paperwork, that has downstream consequences on morale," he said.

"Unfortunately, there are no easy solutions to long-term problems in many places in the education world," Trachman added.

The U.S. Education Department did not have a representative testify due to scheduling conflicts but plans to submit written responses, an agency spokesperson said.

The commission is not planning to hold another briefing on special education teacher shortages but is accepting public comments at [email protected] through Dec. 16.

Sponsored content

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The Challenge

Ft. Wayne Community Schools has a lot to do and not a lot of time to do it. As the kids are sprinting out of the classroom and into summer vacation, Heather Krebs and the FWCS Facilities strike team are making preparations for eight weeks of intensive, heavily scheduled construction management, typically encompassing some 25 buildings strewn all over the district. This varied range of projects is overseen by a scant handful of people. Public funds and inflexible timelines leave no room for waste. None.

The Results

• Enhanced visibility allowed the Coordinator of Program Controls to monitor real-time progress across all projects remotely.
• Unified processes standardized field procedures, enabling multiple general contractors to follow consistent project protocols for greater efficiency.
• Permanent data access provided complete ownership of project data, ensuring all details were archived and easily retrievable for future reference.

Budget-Focused Transparency

FWCS is taxpayer-funded and answerable to the public. This inspires constant focus on budget. Seamless, real-time info-sharing between the project "owners," their contractor and architects minimizes waste—of both time and resources.

Remote and Informed

FWCS’ Heather Krebs and her minimalist team are stretched thin and managing the 20-some active project sites scattered throughout the district is a tall order, to say the very least. Procore’s cloud-based visibility empowers FWCS—the project owner—to dive into and out of active construction projects from afar, checking in on every aspect of the build and providing a holistic, actionable snapshot of the state of each project and of the projects in aggregate.

Centralized Data Management. And You Own It.

Putting all real-time project data in one digital location consolidates it for ease of use in the field. Significantly, Procore gives the owner… ownership; of both the data and access to it. Today and forever. Drawings, floor plans, RFIs—once the project wraps, all the building data is beautifully archived and eternally retrievable for future maintenance.

Doing a Lot with a Little

In 2012 and 2016, bond-funded building projects were approved by public referendum and Indiana’s previously resource-starved Ft. Wayne Community Schools (FWCS) came into $250M. It fell to Heather Krebs and the FWCS Facilities team to wrangle the long-delayed projects and neatly oversee them to budget-friendly completion––making her the owner of all the newlyfunded projects. No big deal. "I do the program budgeting, scheduling and inter-department coordination with our security, technology and purchasing curriculum departments." Heather’s support staff is an exercise in Lean. "In our department there are eight people. Four of us are directly assigned to these projects—two architects, a contractor and an engineer.”

Complete Owner Visibility

Can four people really have eyes on 25 simultaneous projects? Yep. By design, Procore gives Heather and the Facilities team detailed, real-time views deep inside the build(s). "It’s about the flow of information," Krebs says, "It’s about having the information at your fingertips. It’s not stored on a server somewhere or in multiple locations." This real-time xray into project status means sticking to schedules. "We have about eight weeks in the summer when we can really tear into a building and get a whole lot done. So yeah, schedule and phasing coordination I would say are our biggest challenges that we solve with Procore."

Communication is Power

Procore empowers the project owner with remote visibility into the project— allowing complete project oversight to a degree of the owner’s choosing. The transparency and mobility inherent in the Procore platform likewise allows field teams to anticipate missteps and budget-wrecking wrong turns. "I know a lot of us use the mobile app a lot, and that is handy when you’re doing inspections and observations, to just to be able to snap the photo, send it off with a description of what’s going on, and do that all really quickly." Working with public funds means taking seriously the return on investment.

"We look at the advantages and the time savings that the software can provide," says Heather Krebs. "I mean, there’s an expense to any software you’re going to adopt, but for us, the efficiencies that we get in the project communication, Procore pays for itself."

The U.S. Department of Energy has opened recognition applications alongside the start of the 2024-2025 Efficient and Healthy Schools Program, or EHSP, which provides technical assistance to K-12 schools looking to decarbonize buildings.

EHSP, run by the Energy Department and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, allows districts to apply for recognition in categories for assessment and benchmarking, retrofit implementation, operations and sustainable commitment, according to a webinar on EHSP released Oct. 9.

Districts can sign up for the program at any time, with 9,236 schools across 228 districts participating in the program as of September, said the Energy Department. These schools collectively serve over 5.4 million students, according to the webinar. 

EHSP provides technical assistance across nine categories: general program support; energy management; goal setting and planning; technologies and systems; indoor air quality; decarbonization; solar and renewables; resilience; and funding. 

The program aligns with the Energy Department's priorities and targets, which include reducing U.S. building emissions 60% by 2035 and 90% by 2050, compared with 2005 levels, while “enabling net-zero emissions economy-wide and centering equity and benefits to communities,” according to the EHSP presentation. 

Additional goals include reducing on-site energy use intensity in buildings 30% by 2035 and 45% by 2050; slashing on-site greenhouse gas emissions in buildings 25% by 2035 and 75% by 2050; and cutting embodied emissions from building materials and construction 90% by 2050, all compared with 2005 levels, tripling demand flexibility potential from 2020 levels to “enable a low-cost and resilient net-zero grid.”

Districts can earn the district recognition by best performing school in the district or Energy Star certification, for existing buildings that operate 75% or more efficiently than similar buildings nationwide, per the presentation. 

To receive technical assistance, districts must reach out to the program and participate in an onboarding interview. The agency said it will connect districts with subject matter experts and follow up with both “points of contact to ensure technical assistance is provided and beneficial.”

The program previously recognized 13 U.S. school districts during the White House Summit for Sustainable and Healthy K-12 Buildings and Grounds in April, including Broward County Public Schools in Florida, Lansing Public School District in Indiana, Livonia Public Schools in Michigan and the School District of Neillsville in Wisconsin.

Project partners include local contractors, environmental health and safety consultants, utility representatives, project managers, architects, engineers, community members, financial planners and district staff, administration and school board members, EHSP says. 

Benchmarking is a key part of that technical assistance, with the program working to help districts identify underperforming schools and buildings to target efficiency improvements. EHSP also sets investment priorities to compare savings across buildings for informing decisions on how to allocate capital and maximize returns on investment and verifies savings through continuous tracking of energy use over time. 

The process can help identify best practices that are replicable across schools and enable districts to share and report their performance in energy, water, waste, greenhouse gas emissions and indoor air quality, and educate classes and the municipality about how schools are performing. 

This data collection practice is particularly beneficial for “having honest conversations with the community,” Lance Gregorich, project manager and environmental health and safety manager for the school district of Neillsville, said in the webinar. These projects and installations are “long-term community investments,” and require coordination with the community to overcome adversity with planning, cost and implementation, Gregorich said. 

Additionally, EHPS provides a quick building assessment form to help districts identify energy improvement opportunities; an Energy Department asset score tool that generates recommendations for implementing energy efficiency retrofits; and a third-party site audit or energy efficiency measure identification and impacts analysis provided by a contractor. 

The Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, a federally funded research and development center in California, also provides a school prototype and energy retrofit resource, per the presentation. This resource can act as a reference for elementary and secondary schools interested in implementing retrofit packages in their facilities for energy savings, as well as health and safety benefits, according to a November 2022 report by LBNL. 

Schools and districts interested in 2024-2025 recognition awards must submit their applications and request for assistance from the program, if needed, by Dec. 20. Applicants will be notified of recognition in January and will be invited to attend an in-person celebration at the Green Schools Conference in March 2025, per the presentation. 

EHSP is to host a topical webinar on the program on Nov. 14 at 2 p.m. Eastern Time.

Culturally divisive conflict in schools, including responding to threats of violence and to property damage, cost public K-12 schools about $3.2 billion during the 2023-24 school year, according to a survey of 467 superintendents in 46 states by university researchers.

The financial costs of school "culture wars" included additional security, communications and legal expenses. Schools incurred indirect costs from using staff time to address misinformation, social media threats, media inquiries about book bans, and growing demands for public information requests.

In addition to the fiscal hardships, superintendents also noted the personal toll taken by threats against them and their staff, as well as the professional challenge of dealing with conflicts while leading schools.

“It’s important for the public and policymakers to be aware of ways culturally divisive conflicts are harming the schools our children attend,” said Joseph Kahne, co-author of the report and an education professor at the University of California, Riverside, in a statement. “These conflicts come with a very real cost.”

The survey, conducted during the summer, was led by a team of researchers at University of California, Los Angeles; the University of Texas at Austin; American University, in Washington, D.C.; and University of California, Riverside. Researchers also interviewed 42 superintendents in 12 states. 

The survey asked superintendents whether and how often their districts received pushback on teaching and learning about race and racism, policies protecting LGBTQ+ students, and books available to students in the school library. 

Based on their answers, researchers created a "culturally divisive conflict score" that identified each district as having low, moderate or high conflict. Districts considered high conflict, for instance, have strife across several issue areas, and the conflict often includes violent rhetoric or threats.

Nearly all of the superintendents reported some level of conflict during the 2023-24 school year, and 66% said their district experienced moderate or high levels of conflict.  

To determine the fiscal costs of conflict, researchers used per-student calculations — including direct expenditures, indirect costs, and staff turnover costs — and equated those expenses to be about $80 per student for high conflict districts, $50 per student for moderate conflict districts and $25 per student for low conflict districts. 

Researchers calculated the direct and indirect costs of specific actions when addressing conflict. For example, a high conflict district spent $56,300 in direct costs for legal services to address conflicts.

If moderate and high conflict districts were able to reduce divisiveness to low levels, that would save $1.96 billion nationally, according to researchers. 

"This research makes clear that culturally divisive conflicts in the nation’s schools are generating fear, stress, and anxiety that is disrupting school districts and taking a personal toll on the educators and staff members who work in them,” said John Rogers, lead researcher for the survey and a UCLA education professor, in a statement.

Nearly three-quarters of public schools said they had a difficult time filling one or more vacant teaching positions before kicking off the 2024-25 school year, according to the results of a nationally representative survey of 1,392 schools released by the U.S. Department of Education's National Center for Education Statistics on Oct. 17. 

The percentage of schools saying they didn't experience any challenges in filling vacancies this year increased for both teaching and non-teaching staff, from 9% to 14% and 10% to 17% respectively, according to the School Pulse Panel survey results. The monthly data collection has tracked school resources and experiences since the COVID-19 pandemic.

A “lack of qualified candidates” and “too few candidates” applying for open positions remained the most common challenges public schools said they faced in filling vacant positions. The percentage of schools saying candidates felt like salary and benefits were not enough dropped for both teaching and non teaching staff.

The percentage of public schools that faced difficulty hiring teachers before this school year was lower than the percentage that had challenges in the prior two school years. 

While 74% of schools said they had difficulty filling one or more vacant teaching positions prior to the start of the 2024-25 school year, that percentage was 79% in 2023-24 and 80% in 2022-23. 

General elementary teaching positions, special education and English language arts positions remained among the most commonly cited by public schools as having at least one teaching position to fill prior to the start of this school year. Special education remained the most difficult teaching position to hire for this year.

Last year's data showed improving sentiment among public schools about their staffing levels. Less than half, or 45%, said they felt their school was understaffed — down from 53% feeling understaffed entering the 2022-23 academic year. NCES expects to release data on school sentiment toward staffing this school year in December, following its October survey. 

Public education experts sounded alarms over a national teacher shortage following COVID-19 closures — which prompted early retirements, teachers quitting due to difficult working conditions, and other retainment challenges. 

Prior to the 2023-24 school year, teacher shortage data suggested educator vacancies nationwide jumped 51% since the year prior, according to an August 2023 report Kansas State University, University of Pittsburgh and other institutions.

In 2022, the Government Accountability Office, an independent and nonpartisan government agency that audits and investigates agency activity, criticized the Education Department for not developing a "more comprehensive strategy" to support teacher recruitment and retention. 

"The COVID-19 pandemic laid bare teachers’ discontent with aspects of their jobs, including a lack of support for their safety and value as professionals and an increasingly disrespectful and demanding workplace culture — and exacerbated teacher shortages nationwide," GAO said. 

While the department had laid out a vision in summer 2022 that included investing in a strong teacher pipeline and supporting professional development, GAO said the department failed to clearly communicate time frames and performance measures to gauge results of its plan.

The effectiveness of the ESSER money for COVID-19 recovery efforts is difficult to determine because districts were involved in many activities during the pandemic. Additionally, long-term improvements are unknown because not enough time has passed since initial positive effects were noted, according to a report released Oct. 23 by the U.S. Government Accountability Office.

Republican members of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee had asked GAO to examine district ESSER spending. Some conservative lawmakers at the federal level have questioned the proper use of the money.

"New GAO report on ESSER funding found it difficult to determine what uses were effective. More research is needed from the field," read a statement posted Oct. 23 on the Senate HELP Committee GOP page on X. 

AASA, The School Superintendents Association released a September report on spending practices from ESSER's allocations from the American Rescue Plan and found most districts directed money toward expanded learning time, including summer programming and after-school activities.

But because districts had various fiscal priorities and approaches for investing the money in different phases, it was difficult to generalize the best practice approaches for the emergency funds, the AASA report said.

GAO's report said education officials from varying states sometimes differed on what they considered was an allowable expense for district-level use of federal COVID-19 emergency funds for schools. Directives from state legislatures also influenced spending practices.

The variety in approval procedures for spending requests for the Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief funds meant that proposals denied outright in some states may have been granted in others.

Congress allocated nearly $190 billion in ESSER funds and districts generally had broad flexibility to spend the funds to respond to pandemic-related recovery efforts.

GAO researchers — who focused on the 2020-21 and 2021-22 school years — found multiple national, state and district-level factors that influenced varying ESSER spending decisions in the 17 school districts in six states that they studied. 

For example, state officials from Florida, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Texas told GAO researchers that proposals to renovate or upgrade athletic fields, stadiums or tracks were denied because school districts could not justify that those improvements were necessary to respond to the pandemic. California, on the other hand, approved proposals when districts justified the expense through data showing students’ academic and behavioral outcomes.

In some cases, state policies influenced local level spending practices. New York and Texas district officials told GAO that they used initial ESSER funds to replace lost state funding and maintain basic operations after legislatures in those states used ESSER money to replace state education funding to districts.

Likewise, local level spending practices were swayed by community input, districts’ spending philosophy, and through specific financial needs and goals. Other situations, such as supply chain problems and difficulty finding staff and service providers, also hampered spending plans. 

Officials from 16 of 17 districts told GAO they were analyzing the impacts of their ESSER spending, with many saying they were using academic performance data to measure effectiveness of programs like tutoring and summer school. Most districts — 14 of the 17 — said they planned to sustain at least one ESSER-funded initiative even when COVID money expires.

Aging infrastructure, budget constraints and staffing shortages are the top three concerns for K-12 school facilities teams in the 2024-25 school year, according to a white paper released Sept. 17 by IncidentIQ, which with Spaces4Learning surveyed 46 participants from institutions of various types and sizes. 

The average age of a U.S. school building is about 50 years. “Aging infrastructure could have a direct, exponential impact” on budgets, the white paper said, especially considering the costs of necessary equipment and the shorter lifespans of such equipment, such as HVAC units, air purifiers and water heaters, IncidentIQ says. 

“The combination of older buildings and limited capital improvement budgets means that it’s even more important for facilities managers to be aware of the condition of buildings and equipment, and act on potential problems before they become critical failures,” the white paper says. 

Schools across the U.S. are experiencing an $85 billion shortfall in the funding they need to properly maintain and upgrade their buildings and equipment each year — a roughly 85% increase since 2016, according to the International WELL Building Institute’s 2021 State of Our Schools report, which is the most recent year for which the data is available. With inflation, that figure has risen to at least $98.6 billion, per the IncidentIQ report.

The company calls for comprehensive, long term infrastructure investment plans and increased budgets for capital improvements. 

The report suggests the plans take a three-tiered approach: assessment, maintenance and replacement of assets. Operators should begin by evaluating the current condition of their assets and identifying high-risk areas to prioritize for replacement or maintenance attention, then create a plan for current maintenance. Finally, teams can address future replacements by establishing and incorporating end-of-life timelines into their budgets, the report says. 

Delays in maintenance and repairs ranked fourth among the challenges facilities managers said they expect to face this school year, according to the report. When fixes get delayed, problems get worse and more costly and potentially reduce the efficiency and safety of equipment, the report says. Deferring maintenance can also lead to complete system failures that can disrupt school operations, pose safety hazards and result in fines from regulatory agencies.

These potential risks point to the need to prioritize preventive maintenance, which “reduces downtime and costs, takes less time than reactive maintenance, increases equipment efficiency, and can extend the life of assets,” the report states. “The primary reason for deferring maintenance is cost; however, deferring maintenance will clearly cost much more in the long run,” it states.

While a majority of respondents said they expect their budget to increase some or stay the same this school year, almost none expect their budget to increase or decrease significantly, per the report. School facilities costs, impacted by high inflation rates in recent years for commercial machinery repair and maintenance and general repair and maintenance services, are putting pressure on these stagnant budgets, per the report. 

While respondents generally agreed on the importance of collecting data, they had differing opinions on which specific metrics were most important. The metric named most often was maintenance cost relative to the operating budget, followed by the number of maintenance requests, energy consumption, average response time, utility costs per square foot and equipment downtime. 

Improving efficiency is the top goal for the school year survey respondents named most, followed by decreasing maintenance costs. By implementing efficient maintenance strategies, optimizing resource allocation and exploring energy-saving technologies, facilities managers can cut costs without compromising the quality of the learning environment, the report says. 

An energy audit can identify low-lift initiatives that include replacing bulbs with compact fluorescent lamps, improving weatherization or changing air filters, the report says. Training employees on energy-efficient practices and altering occupant behavior to be more energy-conscious are also “easy areas to tackle,” the report says. Larger renovations and retrofit projects can contribute to savings while potentially increasing occupant comfort, the report adds, noting that operators must also understand the return on investment for these improvements to justify future projects.