Wake schools need $2B in facility improvements in next 5 years

A draft report on facility needs shows the Wake County Public School System needs nearly $2 billion in facility improvements over the next five years without a dedicated funding source. It lists $4.4 billion in total facility needs over the next decade.

The more immediate needs are for school renovations, making up about two-thirds of the needs for the next five years.

School districts conduct the survey every five years for the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction. In 2021, they reported $12.8 billion in needs over five years that didn't have a designated funding source at the time.

Since then, traditional public school enrollment has continued to stagnate and even shrink in most districts. But districts, even if they aren't having to build for new student growth, have had to renovate aging structures or replace schools entirely.

In Wake County, enrollment has stayed about the same --- just more than 160,000 students --- for the past decade. Still, the school system has overcrowded schools and has listed more and more needs, focused increasingly on renovations.

The state of the district's existing schools has been a major focus of conversation in recent years, primarily as heating, ventilation and air conditioning systems have broken down during extreme temperatures. Just this month, structural safety issues arose at three elementary schools whose principals said were not built according to plan back in the 1990s. The schools are undergoing emergency repairs for a portion of the buildings that had improper interior wall infrastructure that led to a fast-widening crack at one of the schools.

Some of those needs listed in the next five years would be covered by a more than $600 million lower-interest bond, if voters approve the bond and an accompanying property tax increase later this fall. Without the bond's voter approval, the county could still take out a higher-interest bond to pay for part or all of those needs.

The draft Facility Needs Survey won't be finalized for some weeks and will ultimately be reviewed and published by the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction, which will publish a report compiling all of the needs in every school district.

The report is compiled by a third-party company based on interviews with school employees and using detailed documents of facilities and types of infrastructure, including age, capacity and replacement schedules for things like boilers and chillers.

Interviews with school staff revealed concerns that athletic facilities are often funded by boosters, rather than schools; a desire for more nontraditional learning spaces at magnet schools; and concerns about heating, ventilation and air conditioning failures and mold and slow responses for fixing them.

Over 10 years, $619.3 million of the $2 billion in renovation needs are for heating, ventilation, air conditioning, electrical and plumbing --- all considered one category. Another $2.1 billion is needed for new facilities. That's a combination of new schools and rebuilds of current schools. Most of those new facilities are considered lower priority than the other needs and thus aren't included in the first five years.

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