Policy Talk: A Facility Condition Assessment

If you’ve glanced at an RPS headline in recent months, one thing becomes exceedingly clear: our district has an infrastructure problem.

Oh no! “Assessment” and “Infrastructure”? That’s a lot of boring words! But don’t turn away yet. If there’s any one singular problem that unites RPS families, it’s this one. And it has a few real, actionable solutions that we should be advocating for.

New to the issues? Here’s a brief recap of the last four months of brutal RPS headlines:

William Fox Elementary School Burns
This old school only ever got older. In 110 years of constant, instructional use, it had never had a major renovation. It had mold, old wiring, faulty alarm systems, constant rodent infestations, and had never been retrofitted with basic, necessary safety measures like sprinkler systems. When it eventually caught fire, it couldn’t be contained. In less than an hour this building went from “fit” for student use to instantly decommissioned.

George Wythe High School Crumbles
”Your school doesn’t look very different than when I was Mayor,” Senator Tim Kaine told my friend Tisha when we were there in February. That was more than 20 years ago. Which is more or less how long this building has been slated for replacement. Cracked, leaking, and full of students so resigned and desensitized that they even name the rats. When a contentious meals tax finally delivers the funding to rebuild Wythe, RPS’s elected leaders lack the political will to use the funds to fully deliver a school that meets the anticipated needs of this Southside community.

River City Middle Schools Busts at the Seams
Brand new and still suffering from RPS’s crumbling school problem, River City Middle is dangerously overcrowded because our leadership cannot or is unable to build schools fast enough to keep up with population growth. River City is ALSO dangerously over crowded because they needed to accommodate the students and staff of Elkhardt-Thompson, whose toxic-mold-infested school was abruptly shut down in 2020. This, just 5 years after Eklhardt students were merged with Thompson Middle School because THEIR school - you guessed it - had to be shut down for toxic mold.

RPS either cannot or is unable to adequately maintain schools in our district. When the buildings run out of time, RPS lacks the resources to replace them. Our district is losing schools faster than we are building them, leaving RPS in a crisis.

So which is it - do we lack the will? or the means?

This is a fair question. Particularly because the instinctual response tends to be accusations of “Waste! Corruption! Incompetence! Ambivalence!” - and nobody shouts these things louder than the politicians desperate to deflect blame. The more realistic, most gracious interpretation, though, is this: What RPS has in abundance is love and good intentions, but neither of these can build or repair schools. We need money. We don’t have it. And that’s by (state) design.

Cue the old-timey movie reel, I’m going to break down a quick history lesson in like, 2 sentences:

In 1932, Virginia legislators passed the Harry Byrd Road Act, which delegated school maintenance and construction responsibilities to local school systems. Great, right? Local governance means each locality gets what it needs… except this act doesn’t give localities have the authority to raise the money to do it.

The result - 90 years later - is a state-wide crisis of crumbling schools that need $25 Billion to adequately maintain, modernize, or replace. And every year, school districts fall further and further behind, crushed under these runaway expenses. As you might expect, the rate at which districts fall behind is not equal. High-poverty districts like ours, on average, fall $200k further behind in maintenance investments every year than our peers in wealthier districts.

As reported in the 2021 State of Our Schools.

Our superintendent recently spelled out exactly what all this means for RPS on his weekly appearance on The Gary Flowers Show:

@JasonKamras on the @GaryFlowersShow - says at least 1/2 of RPS schools need to be replaced. 10 or so more need massive renovations. Estimates a $2B state or federal investment to make this happen. 😫😫😫 #vaschoolsareburning #dosomething

— Becca DuVal (@FoxParentRising) May 11, 2022

That conversation touches on a variety of maintenance needs affecting schools around the district. Jason calls in right at the 1:00 marker. Take a listen!

We have a $2B infrastructure need, and - per this year’s maintenance budget - $2.4M currently assigned to address it. At that rate of annual investment, it will take 834 years to meet our district’s needs.

You letting that sink in, too? Yeah. Heavy stuff. If this is 90 years of Harry Byrd Road Act school decay, I can’t phantom another 8 centuries.

Ok. So this maintenance gap - how do we fix it?

Currently, we do as my algebra teacher said about solving large problems: “you eat an elephant…. one…. bite… at… a… time.”

In RPS, the Chief Operating Officer (COO) works with their facilities team to prioritize a list of the district’s maintenance/modernization needs. The Superintendent then has the unlucky position of deciding which items on this list fit the underfunded budget of modern public schools, then shares his recommendation with the School Board. The School Board makes their own adjustments, sends it to the city. The city makes THEIR adjustments and, ultimately, opens up the purse strings.

As far as what projects gets priority? It’s sort of whack-a-mole. Repair the conditions that are the most dangerous to students and staff, and:

• Hope that you had good intel.

• Hope that you prioritized wisely.

• Hope that you had cooperative leadership.

• Hope that you had generous elected leaders.

• Hope for no surprises (or manageable surprises) until the next budget cycle. And,

• Hope school advocates, activists, and their legislator allies can fix the state’s broken school funding model before it breaks your district’s schools.

Oops.

Not quite working for us, huh?

Fortunately, we have local leaders who recognize the need for change, and aspire to use their elected power to implement policy to address it.

What Is A Facility Condition Assessment?

In earlier board business, the FCA is described as a process for “evaluating the overall condition of each RPS school, including the building structure, all mechanical systems, parking lots, athletic fields, playgrounds, landscaping, and other amenities and associated spaces.” Each facility would receive a score of Good, Fair, Poor, or Critical condition. This information is then used to create a long-term plan to meet needed repairs or recommend replacement. This kind of analysis is important for a handful of reasons. Here are just a few:

• It’s really important information. The FCA identifies and illustrates the full scope of the district’s facility needs.

• It’s a valuable budgeting resource. The FCA takes the guesswork out of prioritizing district maintenance needs.

• It’s a significant planning resource. With the FCA, our leaders can address emergency repairs in the context of a broader maintenance plan. (For example: I imagine that, knowing the trajectory of the Diamond District Development, RPS would prioritize smaller, short-term repairs to the Arthur Ashe Center over permanent, much costlier ones. Knowing which of our facilities are in need of full replacement can give our leaders similar clarity when making decisions on their maintenance strategy in the interim.)

• It’s also a community resource. Richmond schools exist within the context of a deeply painful, unjust history of prioritizing the needs of schools serving whiter, wealthier, politically powerful residents - at the expense of everyone else. The FCA recommendations are based on objective observations, not the perceived value of the students within each building or the broader communities they serve. An FCA can tell us where school renovations, replacement, or consolidations make sense and can be used to protect our schools from similar actions when leaders are more motivated by prejudice than by fact.

7th District School Board rep, Cheryl Burke, announced this week that she is introducing another proposal for an FCA. I say “another” - because the RPS School Board agreed to conduct such an audit in last year’s budget. Yet, weeks ago, that same board killed the plan when they rejected the Superintendent’s recommended vendor. Now it’s “back to the drawing board,” AND another year delayed - all while failed/failing RPS infrastructure continues to make headlines and disrupt instruction for the students within.

You can hear Kamras’ explain the need for an FCA, as well as the school board’s frustrating refusal, below:

Still haunted by that 834-year statistic? Well, to meet that urgency, we need investment and policy reform from the state. Nearly every other state in our country contributes more to school construction and maintenance than Virginia does. (Related reading: “If it won’t help, the legislature should get out of the way on school construction”)

Fortunately, there are a lot of potential - bipartisan - solutions. None to the scale that we really need, but the best tools in an emergency are the ones we have available. We just lack a critical mass of legislators to pass these bills. Either we need to vote different legislators into office, or we need to build political pressure to win over more of the elected leaders we currently have.

One easy strategy parent advocates like you and I can use to build this political pressure is to raise public awareness. Our schools are set up to fail - current conditions prove it - and we need to talk about it. Many of our neighbors haven’t stepped foot in a public school for decades, and are genuinely oblivious to this crisis. We won’t get what we don’t ask for - and there are too many Virginia voters who don’t know that we must ask our representatives for substantial school infrastructure investment. We can only change that by getting loud.

Not an expert? No problem! Awareness is as easy as a few clicks to follow organizations like Fund Our Schools, and then committing to share their related posts when they pop up on social media. There’s a lot of great reporting you can share too, like this one. Or simply forward this blog posts to a friend (or 3)! Virginians need to know better so we can vote better - or know better so we can tell our current legislators to do better.

There’s also a wildcard option we ought to consider: a lawsuit. It sounds extreme, but there is precedent. The 2021 State of Schools report says “High poverty districts, often in rural areas, have sued their states seeking adequate and equitable funding. Successful cases in Wyoming, New Mexico, New Jersey, Arkansas, West Virginia, Arizona, California and Kentucky have resulted in increased state capacity and funding assistance for high poverty public school facilities.” I don’t know the first thing about how to make this happen, but - at the point where our schools are burning to the ground or bursting at the seams - we ought to consider legal action before these conditions cause injury or loss of life. Rural Virginia is talking about it already. It might be time for urban districts like Richmond to consider it, too.

I’d like to close today with a sincere thanks for our departing COO, Alana Gonzalez. Today was her last day with the district, after spending a year with all ten fingers and all ten toes in the dam of RPS’ maintenance needs. Thank you for your service to our city, and best of luck in your future endeavors.