As the nation's fastest-growing big county, fed by boom times in Las Vegas, Clark has spent the past five years building new schools. Cartwright is one of them. It was scheduled to open for business with 300 pupils in the fall of 1997. But it wasn't ready.
As in much of the country, a shortage of construction workers had forced the whole project behind schedule. So Cartwright's kids moved in with the existing Beatty School on a double-session arrangement. Beatty met from 7 a.m. to noon; Cartwright from 12:30 to 5:30. The building had two principals, and each of the morning teachers had to share a classroom with one from the afternoon.
By Christmas, the new facility wasn't finished, but it was safe to occupy, and the Cartwright refugees moved in. It seemed like the end of the chaos, but it was only the beginning. "As soon as we got into the new building," says principal Emily Aguero, "my enrollment doubled. We assume some of the parents [who hadn't enrolled] didn't want their children in double-session programs. Some parents delayed moving into the new houses. Some used other addresses to get access to schools in other areas. But a lot of the new enrollment was just pure growth."
By June 1998, Cartwright was at its maximum capacity of 660 students. When Aguero came back in August, somehow there were 400 more. The district quickly sent out eight portable classrooms and Aguero hired 18 new teachers. As the new teachers came on, the bulging classes could be reduced.
But more kids kept coming. So in March 1999, the district told Cartwright it would have to become a year-round school, thus increasing capacity by 20 to 25 percent. This was done. Yet Cartwright still can't stay ahead of the influx. Its population is now 1,400, in a building designed for 640 students.
And next year, in a sense, the whole process will start over: Cartwright's teachers will be sharing their classrooms with their counterparts from yet another school whose construction is behind schedule. "They'll bring in another 12 portables, assign a principal to the new school, and they'll be here until their building is ready," Aguero says. "We're not the only ones, though; four sites will be housing new schools this September."
Few places in America are growing as fast as Clark County, whose school population has been growing by more than 26,000 students every two years. But quite a few have school-planning horror stories to tell. If there is an education crisis in America, it's not just a crisis of learning--it's a crisis of infrastructure. In 1990, public K-12 enrollment nationally was 41.2 million. In 2006, it is projected to be 47.4 million. Those additional kids have to be housed somewhere.
It's not as if we aren't hurrying to build schools to meet the demand. Two years ago, the United States as a whole invested a record $15.5 billion in school construction. In 1999, that number climbed to almost $18 billion. This year's projection is for just under $21.5 billion worth of construction to be completed, and for another $22.8 billion to break ground, looking toward completion in 2001. Even so, in many parts of the country, such as Clark County, no new level of commitment seems adequate to keep pace with demand.
Meanwhile, there is the equally worrisome evidence that the K-12 boom will disappear almost as suddenly as it arrived. If demographers are right, K-12 population will increase until 2006, hold steady for a couple of years, and then start a slight decline in 2008. This makes the whole problem that much more complicated. School districts need new facilities badly, but they may not need them all that long. They are in the uncomfortable position of asking voters and legislatures for massive amounts of school construction money, even as they admit that if they build too extensively, they'll likely end up with a lot of underused facilities a couple of decades from now. "The biggest danger with building schools now," says Rhode Island architect Tom Zito, who has been building them for 35 years, "is building something that will become obsolete overnight."
What it amounts to is that this is a very tough time to be in the school-planning business, even if you are good at it.
The Elk Grove School District, just outside Sacramento, California, is one with a reputation for planning well. In the past few years, one state education official says, Elk Grove "has been transformed from a rural, tight-knit farm community into a large suburb. They've managed the transformation by doing a really good job of planning for the future."
For nearly 20 years, Constantine Baranoff has done Elk Grove's projections for future school population and new construction needs. "When I first came," he says, "there were 17,000-18,000 students. We studied birthrates in Sacramento County and figured out what our share might be. And I began interacting with the developers' community. With that information, I projected that by 1998, we'd have 40,000 students. Actually, it was 43,000 students; today we're at 47,000." A decade from now, Baranoff figures that Elk Grove will have 80,000 students.
Getting the numbers right isn't crucial merely for the sake of avoiding overcrowded conditions. It's necessary in squeezing out the state appropriations and residential developer impact fees without which Elk Grove could never get the buildings built. The Elk Grove district's master plan for the next decade calls for 41 percent of its school-construction money to come from the state, 40 percent from developer fees and 19 percent from local bonds.
The state money is problematical. Two years ago, California passed a $6.7 billion bond measure to construct and modernize school facilities, the largest of its kind in the nation's history. The measure provides a 50/50 state match against local money for new school construction, and an 80/20 match for modernizing existing facilities.
But the $6.7 billion is proving inadequate. There already is a $1.2 billion backlog of modernization requests, and districts throughout the state are worrying that all the money will be gone before the funding reaches them. "When we're out of state bond money," says Duwayne Brooks, the assistant superintendent of public instruction, "it's real tough for the locals to raise the funds to meet school facilities needs. We have to match the facilities needs with school reform, the biggest one of which is class-size reduction. Obviously if you had 30 students in a class and now you have 20, you're going to need a lot more classrooms."
To complicate matters further, California voters said no earlier this year to a measure that would have made it easier for local districts to pass school bonds. A 121-year-old clause in the state constitution requires that such bonds pass by a two-thirds vote. The ballot measure would have reduced that requirement to 50 percent.
During most of the past two decades, school construction dollars around the country have been invested primarily in upgrading and adding to existing buildings. But during the past three years, the trend has reversed somewhat. In 1999, roughly 45 percent of the construction dollars built entirely new schools. Another third went for additions to existing buildings. Only 22 percent went into renovating, modernizing and retrofitting school structures for technology.
But to complicate the process even further, that trend is also likely to reverse again in the near future, as the population bubble called the "baby boom echo" moves from elementary into secondary schools. Elementary schools tend to be small--averaging about 600 children-- with less need for well-equipped gymnasiums, science laboratories and industrial arts facilities. Communities often prefer creating a new one to renovating an old one, even if that means the old one has to close. Secondary schools, on the other hand, are larger, more expensive to build, and more central to local identity. The usual preference of school districts is to enlarge and modernize existing facilities if at all possible.
And an overwhelming number of them need modernization badly. Almost half of America's schools were constructed before 1950. For the most part, they are neither energy-efficient nor equipped to function in the summer. Two years ago, the U.S. Department of Education reported that about 25,000 of the nation's existing school buildings had "extensive repair or replacement needs." It estimated that almost 12 million students were attending schools with less-than-adequate roofs, another 12 million were in buildings with less-than-adequate plumbing, and almost 15 million in buildings with less-than-adequate heating, ventilation and air conditioning.
But modernization often turns out to be a tricky process to execute. "The hardest challenge," says architect Tom Zito, "is dealing with an existing building. In many cases, you can't tear something out because it's a bearing wall. Any spaces you can't accommodate, you hope to push out into new construction. Old science labs, for example, are largely obsolete."
In some cases, school districts are responding to demographic pressures by building a school for one purpose that can be converted to another use later. In Narragansett, Rhode Island, for example, population projections showed that the current need for elementary seats would soon evolve into a need for a new middle school. The district ended up designing the elementary school with a full-sized gym, including locker and shower facilities, even though the younger children wouldn't need them. In effect, Narragansett was implementing a master plan for two buildings--one now, one later in the decade.
As if all of this weren't enough, state courts have begun treating disparity in infrastructure--in addition to disparity in education itself--as an issue of constitutional equity.
In 1994, Arizona's Supreme Court declared the state's school-funding system to be unconstitutional, largely on the basis of glaring differences in the quality, modernity and functionality of different districts' school facilities. The buildings themselves, or lack thereof, the court said, were obvious testimonies to a failure to provide "a general and uniform" education system for all students.
As a result, school-construction financing in Arizona is now essentially being handled by a state agency, the School Facilities Board, which has been charged with bringing all school buildings up to the same quality standard by the year 2003. "The state has taken over all new school construction and pays for it out of state funds that come right off the top," says Phil Geiger, the SFB administrator. "We buy the land or get it donated by developers. We tell the developers: Either give us the land or make a substantial donation, or there will be no school in your development. Few of the 228 school districts have the stuff to do long-term projections, so we work with the districts."
New Jersey is going through a similar process: Last June, its legislature agreed to provide $8.6 billion to satisfy a state Supreme Court school-equity mandate that includes infrastructure as well as educational resources. In Newark alone, the state is being asked to provide nine new schools on new sites, in addition to replacing 34 existing schools and renovating another 14--projects expected to cost a cumulative $1.7 billion.
But neither friendly court decisions nor voluntary state help in building school facilities is an option everywhere. School- construction financing varies enormously across the country, from Hawaii, which pays for virtually all of it by state legislative enactment, to Louisiana and Missouri, which offer no state construction money at all.
Of course, there remains the possibility that the federal government will decide to pitch in. Congress has shown some signs of moving in this direction. In 1997, it allocated $800 million for "Qualified Zone Academy Bonds," which pick up the interest on bonds for school repair or renovation projects in high-poverty areas--places where 35 percent or more students are eligible for subsidized lunch. Legislation has been introduced in Congress that would expand QZABs to include new construction for eligible schools.
And just this summer, addressing the National Education Association, U.S. Education Secretary Richard Riley proposed $32 billion in new federal aid to education, with $25 billion of it for modernizing facilities. Expanding the QZAB program was included in the total package.
But any such windfall--if it comes at all--is unlikely to arrive soon enough to help booming places such as Clark County, Nevada, or Elk Grove, California, where planners figure 34 brand-new schools will be needed before the decade is over. For most school districts, the only real choice is some version of what Elk Grove has been doing for the past 20 years--cobbling together deals involving a variety of funding sources that include state matching grants, general obligation bonds-- both state and local--and taxes and impact fees.
Elk Grove's Baranoff feels confident he has the best possible demographic projections of what may lie ahead, but he also has learned that every September brings a few surprises. The term begins, the schools open, and "oops--there's 100 or 200 more students than we planned."
