Equitable School Facilities
Today’s challenges require school campuses and facility infrastructure to meet new demands:
Ensuring education quality and equity; overturning community and racial injustice; expanding early education; and being a focal point of local infrastructure that supports community health, well-being, and climate resilience in a carbon neutral future.
Why School Facility Infrastructure Matters
Every day, millions of elementary and secondary school children in the U.S. attend public schools with deteriorated and obsolete facilities that undermine achievement, harm health, and are not climate resilient. Why? There are two main reasons:
- Capital funding for public school facility infrastructure remains the most regressive element of public education finance.
- State and local policies, guidelines, and practices for public school facilities remain under-developed and largely disconnected from education equity, health equity, and overall community resilience.
CC+S aims to remedy inequitable finance structures and link planning and investment decisions in ways that leverage co-benefits across education, health, and climate.
Equity & Adequacy
The conditions and qualities of school facility infrastructure matter to children, families, and communities. School facility inequity was a major complaint in the 1954 Brown v Board of Education case and remains a problem in communities across America today. Decades of research confirm that the conditions and qualities of school facilities can positively or negatively impact students, teachers, and overall academic achievement.
The process of planning, advocating for, and designing school facilities can build social capital and foster the rebuilding of trust with communities undermined by discrimination and neglect.