Without state aid, school buildings suffer

It’s been more than 15 years since the state helped fund school construction projects, and even for schools like the Champlain Valley School District that aren’t facing massive, deferred maintenance costs, staff there is wasting no time in preparing for a troubling next 10 years.

In April 2022, the education committees in both the Vermont House and Senate commissioned the independent analysis, “Vermont School Facilities Inventory and Assessment,” that reviewed a broad range of facility-related factors in 54 school districts across the state.

The study utilized a Facility Condition Index to measure the aggregated depletion percentage of facilities for each district. The higher the percentage, the greater the need for infrastructure replacement or upgrades. The average for the districts participating in the study was 71.4 percent, which reflected a considerable amount of concern for the overall condition of school infrastructure across the state.

Although Champlain Valley School District’s overall depletion percentage of 48 percent fared better than other districts, staff is still dealing with a slew of issues related to failing infrastructure due to aging buildings.

Gary Marckres, the district’s chief operations officer, said that although the buildings have been relatively well maintained, many of them are reaching the end of their useful life.

“That’s where the needs specifically come from, just the age of our buildings,” he said. “Even though they’re in pretty good shape, and they’ve had good solid investment, it’s just getting to the time period over the next 10 years where many systems will be will not be able to continue in the in the state that they’re in.”

For decades, Vermont provided state money to cities and towns to build or renovate schools, but the state shut down its school construction aid fund in 2007. The program used to fund up to 30 percent of a school infrastructure project.

“You have to remember that it was right before the 2008 recession,” said Chittenden County Sen. Ginny Lyons, who was involved in these infrastructure conversations in the Legislature in 2007. “A discussion was had about finding savings and reducing property taxes. So historically, there were good intentions about helping people with their property taxes, but the bad outcome is that it put significant pressure on school boards to find additional money when schools were failing.”

Vermont is now the only state in New England without a school construction aid program, along with the second oldest building stock of school buildings in the country, said Jill Briggs Campbell, the Vermont Agency of Education’s operations director.

“That doesn’t necessarily mean that those buildings are going to be in poor condition if they’ve been well maintained, it’s all about ongoing maintenance and operations,” she said. “It’s more that we have a huge backlog of deferred maintenance, and school districts have not been able to budget appropriately for ongoing maintenance and operations.”

But the district’s biggest issues currently don’t have much to do with deferred maintenance, said Marckres.

“The deferred maintenance answer is not how I would characterize Champlain Valley Union,” he said. “We haven’t deferred a lot of maintenance until recently.”

The largest issue facing the district now is a mix of inflation-related costs in the construction industry that have caused the district to postpone several planned projects.

In 2022, voters approved a $7.5 million bond vote to fund various infrastructure upgrades in school buildings, including $4.7 million in upgrades just at Charlotte Central School, which was built in 1969.

The majority of the work focused on a sizable electrical system upgrade as well as a new building-wide fire suppression system. But now, costs are more than double what had already been budgeted, leaving the district with a nearly $3 million shortfall.

In addition to the list of capital investment projects, the district, like many throughout the state, is facing the pressures of rising capacity issues.

“We are a school district that demographic studies say will grow over the next 10 years,” Marckres said. “There’s a lot of building that is already approved to happen, particularly in Hinesburg and some in Williston as well, that will put some capacity pressures on our school,” he said, noting that the change in multi-tiered systems of supports and interventions that require one-on-one spaces take up most of the space that was traditionally used for full classrooms.

Marckres said that the district is currently planning a revision of the school’s capital improvement plan after Town Meeting Day that will expand the current committee to include community members to help inform a new long-range capital plan.

Through Act 72, adopted in 2021, the state restarted a conversation about setting standards for school facilities — which the state does not currently have — for things like training and certification standards for facilities managers and doing a thorough comprehensive facilities assessment for every public-school building in the state.

“That work is being completed now,” Briggs Campbell said. “We’re getting the final reports in. That also allows us to do modeling on what the need is with dollar amounts attached to it. So, we’re going to have a better sense of the actual condition of our school facilities.”

All this is meant to inform the work of the State School Construction Aid Task Force, which was created in the appropriations bill of the last legislative session, Act 78. It creates a 17-member group co-chaired by the Agency of Education and the Vermont treasurer’s office, which will present a proposal to the Legislature in January on a reinstated state school construction aid program.

“What we’re looking at is a proposal to restart in this next legislative session and the question, of course, will be balancing the needs that we’re identifying with the funding resources available,” Briggs Campbell. “We’re at this pivot point. At the agency level and on my team, it is our understanding that if the mission is equitable access to high-quality education, that includes facilities.”