Dive Brief:

A suburban Maryland school system near Washington, DC, is changing the process it uses to determine whether schools need renovating or rebuilding and which facilities are in the greatest need of attention.

A critical report by the Montgomery County, MD, government found that once school officials there assign a priority to a school in need of major repairs or improvements, they do not change that rank, even if the building gets a minor upgrade that might make its overhaul less urgent. For example, when an elementary school ranked as the 21st most in need of renovations installed long-overdue new fire sprinklers and strobe lights, its need for further modernizations became less pressing, yet it did not lose its place in line, the report said. That process keeps needier schools from moving closer to getting critical improvements, the report said.

The report also said the system too often completely rebuilds aging schools rather than renovating them to bring them up to current standards and codes. The school system retorted, however, that it is often less expensive to reconstruct rather than renovate schools with low ceilings or too little space.

Dive Insight:

While the report focused on a single school system, which will spend $117 million a year on construction and renovations over the next five years, its criticisms and recommendations could apply to many other jurisdictions and prove useful to contractors asked to advise local governments as they create their capital budgets.

Montgomery County’s Office of Legislative Oversight, which published the report, pointed out that school officials could improve their system for prioritizing school construction by studying the practices of neighboring governments.

For example, a system in nearby Fairfax County, VA, considers the environmental impact of reconstruction, which the report said produces more non-recyclable demolition debris than a renovation. And others continually update their rankings to account for sudden changes in student enrollment, which could make the addition of classroom space more urgent for a school assigned a low priority just a couple of years ago.

Also, the county’s criteria for ranking a school renovation as high priority includes its use of water, but it does not consider the cause for above-average water consumption, the report said. An elementary school near the top of the list because it uses too much water is the only one in the county with a swimming pool.