 So we shouldn't say anything about the Texas Legislature passing the anti-immigrant and anti-independent. Just say it. Hi, Dad. Thank you for coming to the book. Yeah? Yeah. I'm trying to think of what you're going to call me. Just still sly, folks. I'm horrible, would it? Because I know. Can you get Rose to come up here and help me? She was allowed to think of me. Let's just give you a better job. Are we good? All right. Good morning, everybody. Buenos dias. Welcome on behalf of the Intercultural Development Research Association and the Jose A. Cardenas committee, a fellowship committee. We welcome you to our second symposium and this, it will be titled the State Investment in School Facilities. On behalf of our president and CEO, Dr. Maria Robledo Montecel, more affectionately known as CUCA, we welcome you this morning. We're happy for you to be here with us to talk about this really important issue. Before we get into this often neglected issue of school facilities financing, I wanted to say a few words about IDRA and what the big deal is about school finance in general, looking back in history. As some of you may know, in 1973, there was a Supreme Court decision, a U.S. Supreme Court decision in a case known as Rodriguez versus San Antonio ISD. It was where a group of property poor districts, a group of parents, primarily parents in property poor school districts, who challenged the inequities in the school finance system. They were severely unhappy. They were terribly disappointed with the opportunities that their children had in their schools compared to the opportunities that other children had in other schools. After all, they expected schools to be able to deliver a high quality education for all students all across Texas. They were all trying to compete for jobs in the workforce, for careers in the workforce, and most importantly, they were trying to compete for college admission slots and for scholarships as well. And so what mattered in the schools really mattered in life for many students and families. And the notion of education being the great equalizer when it was so unequal was so far fetched that it just really wasn't a reality. So they turned to the courts after the policy makers had failed them and that case walked all the way up to the U.S. Supreme Court after they had won in the lower court. And the Supreme Court came back with a very disappointing decision in the case, simply saying that nobody has a right to equal funding in public schools and that these poor students and children aren't necessarily recognized as what we call a protected class in the legal world. And so Dr. Jose E. Cardenas, who was an expert in the case, who was a former superintendent in the Edgewood public schools, felt that there needed to be some organization setup that would be committed to conducting research that would be committed to conducting analysis that would be committed to delivering useful, necessary school finance related information to policy makers so that they couldn't claim ignorance so that they could start devising more comprehensible, more necessary policies. So from that he founded what is now known as IDRA, the Intercultural Development Research Association. And this was in 1974, 73, 74, immediately following the decision. And so it was that incredible vision that he had from the very beginning, knowing, based on his own experiences, knowing on this incredible case that was impacting education, not just here in Texas, but across the country. That decision has really impacted a lot of court decisions all across the country, including the most recent Texas school finance decision again where it seemed like our Supreme Court circled all the way back to 1973 to find what is going on in the state of education, unfortunately. So with that, as many states have challenged both policy makers and both policy makers both in the state capitals and in the state court system, they've brought claims of equity. So what are the differences between school districts within a state? What are the differences on an adequacy point? So what is this overall sufficiency? So even if you have equality in funding, is it actually sufficient to bring the opportunities to children in the school? What we often don't hear in these cases, not all the time, but what we often don't hear is what about the schools themselves? What about the school buildings themselves? What is the equity concerns there? What are the adequacy concerns for children who are trying to learn in these schools? And there have been some cases where they have addressed the issue of school facilities. Arizona is one, another one is in Colorado, where there is an incredible record about the deficiencies from open wires in classrooms and in career and technology classrooms to breaking down foundations in classrooms to sloping hallways to molded school buildings, run to where one of the justices in the descent in the Colorado school finance case had noted a vigorous descent that was opposing the majority opinion that found the system was good enough there. But he said, you know, there's record evidence here of the floorboards in the classrooms around the heaters being so worn in because that's where students would gather to learn in the classroom because they didn't have sufficient heating in the classroom. In the 2004 case where Maldef and other experts had built a substantial record on the condition of facilities from El Paso to the valley, they had open air gyms in the valley that where kids were supposed to be playing in their 95 degree heat and 95% humidity. And yes, physical education does make a difference in learning. But beyond that, again, it was broken foundations, it was insufficient heating, lighting, air conditioning, remarkable evidence on the impact of the condition of school facilities on learning, on academic achievement, dozens and dozens of pages on findings on the inequities, the inequities that are examined by IDRA in funding in that case on the facility side. Yet the Supreme Court came back and said, well, you didn't prove that nobody could actually access an adequate education with these conditions of facilities. And yeah, there's incredibly different, incredible differences between an Alamo Heights raising funds for their facilities versus an Edgewood ISD raising their funds for facilities. But it doesn't matter because you're still not telling us that these kids can't access an adequate education. And the examples can go on and on. I remember in the Williams case in California where one of the children was being cross-examined vigorously by a defense attorney for the state. And he said, well, what do you mean the conditions of the facility? How is that impacting you? You have your books, they're teaching you the instruction. And she remarked, well, when you see a rat running across the floor in your school building because there's a hole in the wall, that matters. That bothers me. How am I supposed to pay attention to this deep math lesson when I have to watch for rodents that might be carrying rabies in the classrooms? There's a great video from South Carolina titled The Corridor of Shame. And it is The Corridor of Shame in South Carolina where many rural school districts have been neglected. Their school facilities have been neglected. And it is incredibly stark that in the 21st century, we still have great inequities in the condition of facilities such as that in South Carolina. And again, this is not just an issue for some school districts, for some states. It's a national issue. We have a president who wants to build a wall for $10 billion instead of building 600 public schools across the country that he could possibly build with those $10 billion. So it is a great honor for IDRA to have this symposium, to have Dr. Maria Elena Rivera. I remember when we were putting out the proposal, Albert Cortez, who's on the committee and then was an IDRA employee. We were like, oh, we need to put something about facilities out there as one of the proposed topics for the new researchers. That was part of the vision also of Dr. Robledo Monticell who said, you know what, we need more research on school finance. We need to be able to support this. So she created this fellowship in honor of Dr. Jose E. Cardenas and created a great committee with Al Coffman formally with Maldef and now at St. Mary's with Dr. Jaime Chahin, a dean at Texas State University with Selena Moreno at Maldef and again Dr. Albert Cortez. But when we were putting out the proposals and we put that out on facilities, we're like, well, you know, who's going to bite about that? But we have to. You know, it's a seminal issue, just like with our school accountability systems impacting school finance systems as well. And then when we got the proposal and we got great proposals from researchers across the country, but when we got Maria Elena's proposal, it was just we knew, right? And I think all the committee members, we sent it and it was hands down. It was like, we have to support this research. So we're really excited to have Dr. Rivera with us here today to present her research briefing about what about the school's factors contributing to expanded state investment in school facilities. She conducted a study in five states and we have those one pagers available on nowcast, which is live streaming this event. We also have the PowerPoint presentations from our panelists who will be here joining us and that's Mary Falardo, I Mexicanized some things. Mary Falardo, the executive director at the 21st Century Fund. Dr. Jeffrey Vincent, the deputy director and co-founder of the Center for Cities and Schools at the University of California Berkeley. And they will be following Dr. Maria Elena Rivera and their bios are located in the program that you have there. And finally, Mr. Raul Villaseñor, who will give a local perspective based on Texas. He is the managing director of First Southwest, a division of hilltop securities has been dealing with school finance issues, both as a school board member and as an expert in school finance on the bonding side of school finance facilities in Texas. So he'll be offering a key perspective of that. So we look forward to your questions today. You do have a program with different materials. I would encourage you to look those over but of course not during our presentation because I think that we have great information that's gonna be shared here. So again, without further ado, I wanna introduce Dr. Maria Elena Rivera, the assistant professor of Education and Community Leadership at Texas State University College of Education. Thank you. First of all, thank you so much, everybody for coming out. And I have to begin by just saying a huge thank you to IDRA, not only for supporting the work of emerging scholars, but also for helping to organize this symposium. These experts sitting here have graciously agreed to come and talk about this important topic. And I'm just so thrilled that you guys all came out and happy that everybody is here today. So thank you so much. So as David said, my name is Maria Elena Rivera. And I wanna begin by acknowledging that oftentimes when I start talking about facilities to people or finance, their eyes start to glaze over. So I think it's really important or I've learned in the last few years that it's important to start by talking about why I think this issue is so important and how I came to this work. So I was a school teacher in New York City, I'm from San Antonio but taught in New York City in the Bronx. And the school that I taught at the middle school was just, it was a great place to be, but the facilities were badly in need of renovation. And so when David was talking about rodents running around the classroom, we had that, I would have to tell my kids, okay, pull up your feet and mice would run across the floor of our classroom. I was trying to teach algebra and we had leaky windows where the cold air and water would come in if it was raining. And it really affected my students' abilities to concentrate and to learn. It affected me as a teacher and how I felt about being there. And so I got really interested in this topic and have been studying it for the last several years. And so I'm happy now to be able to do case studies of five different states. Looking at how different states are finding their school facilities in really interesting ways. So I want to emphasize that there is a growing body of literature on the importance of educational facilities. For those of you that are interested in the topic, this is just a tidbit of what's out there. So school building conditions have recently been linked to school climate, to test scores mediated by school climate and student attendance, to teacher absenteeism and retention, and to student absenteeism. So we know that facilities are important for student learning. And perhaps more importantly though than the literature is the quality of educational facilities really signals to children the extent to which society is willing to invest in them. And how much we're willing to support their access to equitable resources and ultimately ensure their equal educational opportunity. So even though we're talking about finance and construction and billions of dollars, it's important to remember that we're talking about the kids here and what their learning conditions are like. So currently the federal government plays a miniscule role in the funding for educational facilities which Mary and Jeff will talk about in a moment. So therefore states are kind of left to choose their own adventure or design their own educational facilities, finance policies. And for how they're going to address local school construction, renovation and maintenance. So each state currently has its own system and there are about ten states or so providing no funding at all for local school facilities. And so the design of the study is I was conceptualizing it and then editing it with the feedback from IDA's wonderful committee. Was that there are multiple pathways that states can take to improve how they fund educational facilities? And I do want to say that while I would never try to minimize the importance of dollars, how much money we're actually putting into facilities, there are other factors that are also important. Other things that states can do, policies, programs, initiatives that improve the quality of educational facilities. And so I wanted to understand what those were and what other options were for states. So the research questions that I looked at were first, what factors contribute to expanded state investment in equitable public school facilities? And then once we get those factors kind of synthesized, how can we leverage those to encourage states that aren't really making a big investment in facilities? How do we get them to improve their investment and support facilities funding? The conceptual framework that I use for this study was a blend of critical policy analysis and fiscal sociology. And critical policy analysis is like it sounds, it looks critically at policies. And assumes that policies differentially impact disadvantage segments of the population and that there are power asymmetries related to race, class, and location. And then fiscal sociology really looks at the importance of context in the study of taxation, public debt, and state spending. And there are a lot of scholars doing work in fiscal sociology in that field right now. But not a lot of them have looked critically at education policies. So I'm using kind of that lens that they use to look at this field. And then the methods. So data collection, I actually had a great time working on this study. So first I did a massive literature review of existing research on educational facilities. So I tried to read everything I could get my hands on that people have already written on this topic. And then I did a first round of interviews where I basically just picked up the phone and called experts in school finance and facilities around the country, told them what I was working on and asked to speak with them. And people were incredibly generous and provided a lot of information about the lay of the land and how they see facilities financing and school finance developing around the country. From those first interviews, I developed a five state case study where I looked in depth at these five states policies. I did a policy document analysis and then did more interviews in each state with school finance and facilities experts, researchers, lawyers, consultants, et cetera, for a total of 44 interviews for this study. And then I did thematic coding of all of the data that I collected. So the case study states, you see up here, Texas, Wyoming, New Jersey, Massachusetts, and Ohio. And how did I pick those five? So basically when I was speaking with all the experts in the first round of interviews, I asked them, I said, I'm looking for states that are really doing interesting things, really trying to improve the equity of how they fund their school facilities. What state should I look at? And I got a list, it kept getting shorter and shorter, and I ended up with these five. And I want to point out something important. These states are not meant to be representative of the facilities policies that exist, as Mary will tell you, they're outliers. But what they show is different things that states are doing to improve the way they fund facilities. So we will go through each of these. I will now share some of the key findings from this study, though. I really encourage you to look at either the five state one pagers or the executive summary. If you have a bit more time, the full report, because it'll give you a lot more detail about what these states are doing. So the first research question is a reminder asked, what factors contribute to expanded state investment in equitable public school facilities? So I want to walk you through the way, I'm about to show you six different charts. So I want to walk you through how I organize the charts first so they'll make sense. So what you see up here is three different categories. From fiscal sociology, one of the conceptual lenses I was using, state spending, taxation factors, and public debt policies. And I was looking, as I said, for different factors or different policies or things that states are doing in each of these categories that kind of improve equity. So if a state was doing something that their policy wasn't really improving equity very much, it was low, or you'll see it color coded as red. If it was sort of moving us toward more equitable school facilities, you'll see it in yellow in the charts coming up. And if I determined based on what I learned from my interviews with the experts and from the literature that those policies were really going to help improve the equity of school educational facilities finance or funding. Then you'll see that those things in green, right? And so what I want to also note is that the low, moderate, and high categories are kind of in a relation to each other. So I think different scholars or probably the experts up here might define things a little bit differently than I did. So these aren't pure cut offs. They're just kind of in a relationship to one another and how I defined it. So I do look forward to any debate or differences of opinions about whether things are moving us toward more equity. All right, so the first category that you see here is state spending or aid factors. So I wanted to walk through a couple examples of how I coded things before we get into our five states. So in this category, after I did all the interviews with experts and consulted the literature, I came up with five different factors, which you see on that blue column on the left. And the factors in this category of state spending that were really important were the first was aid funding. This is the big one. What types of aid funding is the state providing for local school districts in terms of funding their educational facilities? And if the state's aid formula or funding programs didn't consider equity, maybe the state was giving out money on the first come, first serve basis. For example, I categorize that as low. Moderate would be if the state, for example, had was giving out money based on one or two relevant factors, that would be moderate. And then I categorize states as having high equity investment in aid formula funding programs if they distributed aid based on some comprehensive set of factors, including local ability to pay and facilities needs. So again, you'll see these are imperfect designations. But I was trying to think through what are different states doing and what is the spectrum of whether or not these policies are moving us to more equity or not. And state share, I got for state share and adequacy. These numbers actually come from a really excellent report that Mary Falardo put out last year, called the State of our Schools Report. And which they'll talk more about, I'm sure, that talks about how much money states have been spending on their school facilities. And so if the state and the years were fiscal years 1994 to 2013. So if you look at adequacy, if over that time period the annual average school construction capital outlay was less than $950 per student, I categorize them as low. And you see the different dollar amounts there. So that's kind of how I walked through these different aid factors and kind of put things into categories. On the second category, taxation factors or sources of funding. There were three major factors that arose from coding the data, shown in the left most column. So these include first, whether the state had tax caps or limits on how much money they could raise for facilities. The second was the diversity of their revenue sources. Specifically, I looked at how many different sources of funding they were able to use for educational facilities. And then the third category, the third factor rather, was whether the states use statewide versus local tax collection for school construction. If taxes were collected locally with little or no redistribution around the state, then I categorize them as low equity investment. Whereas states were categorized as high equity investment, if the taxes for school facilities were collected statewide and then redistributed. And then in our third category, this is the last one. Public debt factors. The three factors that arose from the data collection were first, whether the state provided credit enhancements. And this was a simple yes or no. So if the state allowed districts to use the state's credit rating, then they were recognized as having a higher equity investment. The second factor was whether the state provided debt payment assistance programs. And then the third factor was whether states primarily use debt for facilities, which I categorized as low equity investment versus whether they used more pay-as-you-go systems, which I categorized as high. And so on this one, I have to point out that there are a lot of scholars in the field that might disagree with me on whether or not using debt versus pay-as-you-go systems are more or less equitable. So I do welcome that debate. The reason I kind of settled on this is that many of the experts I interviewed agreed that relying too heavily on debt could endanger equity in a state because it really ties the state's hands for decades to come and can limit a state's ability to respond to immediate facilities' needs, though using debt in some cases does make a lot of sense, especially depending on what the state's other options are. All right, so here's the fun part. Now after developing the equity investment typology, I then was able to apply it to the five states after doing extensive policy analysis in those states and interviewing experts at the state level and in each of those five states. So here's our first category. State spending and aid policies. And you see across the top are our five case study states, Texas, Wyoming, New Jersey, Massachusetts, and Ohio. And I am a proud Texan, but the first thing I have to point out is that Texas has a lot of red in this column, so I'll walk you through this as an example. Surprise. So in Texas, I want to make sure I go through the ones I wanted to go through. I classified Texas's aid formula as moderate because the state does distribute aid based on a property while sliding scale, but because the state lacks a comprehensive inventory of facilities, it can't use relevant factors like building condition or need to distribute funding to school districts. And the state only provides about 9% of the state's share for educational facilities. So I classified that as low equity investment. Texas also ranked low on technical assistance because they indicated, I had the states fill out a survey as well. And Texas indicated on a survey that not only does it not have a specific facilities department, but they only have about three and a half or four people depending on the time of year working on educational facilities. So they're not able to provide a lot of technical assistance to school districts to help them out with their facilities programs. Texas also ranked low on stability because one of its aid programs, the IFA program is not consistently funded by the legislature, which many of the interview respondents indicated as a concern. And if you look by contrast to Massachusetts, for example, it ranked high on each spending category and aid category. It distributed aid for facilities based on project need, urgency, and local district wealth. And note that the state provides 67% of the funding for education facilities and that the state provides in-depth technical assistance. And again, well, I don't have time to go through each state and each category, kind of walking through a couple examples so you can see what some of the different options are that states are doing and how different states applied some of these factors in their policies. Also, if you're interested in how states can do things to have one sort of program for certain districts and another sort of program for other districts, I would point you to New Jersey because they have one program that they use where they provide 100% of funding for 31 of their SDA or high needs districts or formerly Abbott districts in their state, whereas the rest of the districts in the state have a completely different funding system. So you'll see some of those, you'll see more of those nuances in the full report. In the second category, I'll pull out a couple interesting examples here. We see a lot of yellow. Here, Wyoming stands out with higher equity investment than other states. Note that its legislature has unlimited taxation powers to fund schools. Wyoming also collects taxes statewide and then redistributes those taxes to local school districts. And local districts in Wyoming, they have an interesting system there where the state provides them with all the money they need for their school facilities, but the districts still have flexibility if they wanted to add a pool or something. They could do a local bond for just a smaller amount for those what they call enhancements. The issue with Wyoming right now, which really highlights the importance of diversifying revenue sources, is that the state for a long time has been relying on coal lease bonuses to fund their educational facilities. But now with federal policy changes and state policy changes, they can't rely on that funding source as heavily anymore. And so when I was doing data collection for this, they were in the process of trying to figure out what funding source they were gonna use to replace that. So that's an argument for diversifying your revenue sources. And also note that Massachusetts, for example, has an interesting revenue source. They have a policy that dedicates a portion of all sales tax revenue to the Massachusetts School Building Authority, which provides a stable statewide revenue source. And then in our final category of public debt policies, we see that four of the five states allow districts to use the state's credit rating. Three of the states have strong programs to ease districts debt burdens. And with regard to debt versus pay, as you go, Wyoming is really the only state that would claim on their survey and in their interviews, they were proud to be a pay-as-you-go state. Though Massachusetts was also less reliant on debt than Texas, New Jersey, and Ohio. So we've gone through now the equity investment typology, how I developed it and applied it to the five case study states. And all of these charts help address that first research question, which was what factors contribute to expanded state investment in equitable public school facilities? And briefly on the second research question, it was saying, okay, now that we've gone through these factors, I identified these different things that states are doing, how can we leverage that to kind of give advice to other states that want to improve how they fund educational facilities and make their facilities more equitable? So a few big takeaways are that states with various constraints and policy preferences have taken these different policy pathways. They've done different things. There was no silver bullet and there are lots of good ideas out there. No case study state had a perfect system, though there, as we saw, states excelled in various areas over others. And then the facilities funding system, this is a big takeaway that I like to talk about anytime I get a chance to talk about this is that anytime you have a facility's funding system based primarily on local property values, it's going to be less equitable. And I have a couple, kind of, I go through this in the paper or in the report and you'll see it also on the executive summary. But for each of those three categories, there are a few specific policy recommendations that came from the experts that I interviewed and also in thinking through what all these different states are doing. So I'll share a few examples with you. With regard to the first category of ensuring equitable state spending, states can develop a ranking system. Jeff talks a lot about this in his work about the importance of doing a statewide inventory. You can't really know how you need to spread out the dollars to improve equity if you don't know what the quality of your school facilities are. That's an important first step. And ranking systems that consider need, urgency, capacity and growth are really important. States can also provide the aid based on a sliding scale. Once you get that information, how do you give out money? It makes sense to give more money to those that need it more. And then states also need to ensure adequacy as well as equity. I think a lot of people in Texas would argue that Texas tries to consider equity in its IFA and EDA programs, but there's not enough money there to really make as big a difference as we would need to see to ensure equity. So adequacy is important as well. Another thing that I think I need to focus more on is the importance of maintenance as well as new construction, right? Because if you put all this money, millions and billions of dollars into building new school facilities, you have to make sure that you maintain that investment. And so states need to really think about the importance of facilities as an ongoing cost. For the reality of facilities as an ongoing cost. Another thing that I think is maybe not the sexiest thing to talk about, but really important is technical assistance, right? So local school districts maybe build a facility if you're a smaller district once every 50 years. They don't necessarily sit around thinking about this all the time. So when it comes time for them to build a new facility, it would be nice if they can go to the state and get some help with that. And we have a lot of great private experts working in the private sector that will work with school districts to do that. But it's not always consistent. Not all school districts might have a great financial advisor down the road from them. So we've seen that lots of states have been successfully providing some of that technical assistance to districts. And that's an important thing for them to do. And then finally establish a dedicated stable funding source specifically allocated for facilities. In the taxation mechanisms and sources of revenue category, states can consistently and predictably raise money to fund facilities, diversify those taxation mechanisms and really consider consolidating districts. So this is an issue in some states like Texas or California. We've got a thousand or so districts here. California's got a thousand or so districts in places like Massachusetts. They've got itty-bitty townships. And what ends up happening is that the state is relying on local property values to fund educational facilities. Then you see a lot of disparity in those local property taxes. And so one thing that states could look at doing is consolidating their districts to kind of even out some of those disparities in local property values. Obviously that's easier said than done but it's something worth exploring if the state thinks that that's something that could work for them. And then on the last category, states can provide, talking about public debt, states can provide credit enhancement for local school districts allowing them to use the state's credit rating which really helps in districts that have had a history of financial woes like some of the districts I was looking at in California for my dissertation research. States can also provide state debt assistance programs on a sliding scale and they can set their debt limit at a level that allows fast growth districts to access the funds they need to prevent students from spending too much time in portables. And I wish I had more time to talk about this topic. My mother's in the audience and has spent many years teaching in portable facilities and some teachers love it but it's not necessarily the best way to educate all of our students. And I think California had something like 75,000 portable facilities. They see nods from California folks. And so that's definitely something to consider when I can talk about portables all day. All right, concluding thoughts. So the quality of a child's school building is directly related to the decisions of their state's policy makers, right? I mean, we construct our reality. We are where we are in the state, in the individual states because of the decisions of these policy makers that we elect. And I think that's important to remember that we can change things to make them better. And that's what the study was trying to look at is what are states doing differently? What are some good ideas that are out there? How can we borrow those and apply them in other places? And something that I would also wish I had all day to talk about was how persistent patterns of racial and socioeconomic segregation have long lasting implications. So we need to think about the importance of context, right, and how we develop our cities and how a lot of that inequity is tied to local property values. And my very last point is that given the recent evidence that's coming out in the empirical literature and from a lot of studies done, many done by the brilliant people sitting here, is that given how much we're learning about the importance of school facilities, we really need to push, equity advocates really need to push not only at the state level, but also at the national level for a bigger role and from the federal government in funding educational facilities. So with that, I just wanna say one more big thank you to IDRA for allowing me to do this research project for providing the funding and the support and the one month that I got to spend in San Antonio with y'all doing this work every day was wonderful and then the ongoing support throughout the year. And thanks for all of you for being here because you're obviously interested in the topic. And I think everybody working on this will help to move it forward. So appreciate it and I look forward to your questions and feedback. David, you might have to do this. Something is here to do this. All right, thank you, Dr. Rivera. And next we'll have Mary Falardo again, the executive director of the 21st Century School Fund and she will be doing this jointly with Dr. Jeff Vincent. Good morning, I think it is. It's a little later, I'm Eastern Time. I'm Mary Falardo and I'm the founder and executive director of the 21st Century School Fund which is a very small non-profit that actually doesn't have money for real but as a parent organizing parents and community in my public schools in the District of Columbia, we were trying to find ways to raise money to rebuild this 1926 school that my children were at. And so we decided we would think big and we did in fact do a public-private development partnership that financed the reconstruction of that school at a time when Congress had taken over the finances of the district and there was no ability to finance, there was nothing. And the school had been closed for asbestos, for fire code violations but we loved our neighborhood public school. And so that community got together and started working to plan better for school facilities and it was that sort of foundation that for us led to an organization that initially worked locally on school facility issues in the District of Columbia. And then we started reaching out to find is there anybody else who's thinking about education and equity in school facilities? And there are a few of us but you can see there's not a lot of us still. So we wanna encourage really greater scholars to worship, greater work, greater attention to this because we think it's a fabulous way to build social capital, to build better schools and not just better buildings. And so that's really what we're about. And I wanna turn to Jeff and he's gonna introduce himself and then talk about what we're gonna do together and then we're gonna get to it. Great, thanks Mary and good morning everyone. So I'm Jeff Vincent from the Center for Cities and Schools at the University of California Berkeley. So we're at the university and we are a policy research center, an engaged policy research center that works a lot with local public agencies, state agencies as well as federal organizations and do a lot with really sharp policy advocacy organizations like Mary's. But we're made up of education policy folks at Berkeley and urban planning folks, right? So we named it the Center for Cities and Schools because we know that the places that children and families spend all of their time whether it's at home, whether it's at school, whether it's getting to and from those places and all of the other things that families do, those places, those built environments really impact and affect opportunity, they impact and affect health and they really set the stage as David alluded to for the trajectory of children in their lives. And so we have a specific focus on the built environments of places and the ways in which those places can structure opportunity for children and families or how are they putting up obstacles for children and families. So we do work on transportation for families or land use issues and we do a lot of work on particularly as Mary said, engaging families in the planning and change, physical and social change of those places. And we spent a lot of time looking at the built environments of schools themselves and we know that there's a lot of really subpar conditions to put it very mildly. As David described, Mary Elena pointed out in the schools across this country and as Mary and I will talk about, we've joined together with a handful of other organizations around the country to really figure out how do we remedy this? And I think that the work Mary Elena has done is really exceptional in moving the ball forward and I think one point she had towards the end there I think is really important and drives part of the work that we do which is that the qualities and conditions of these physical environments of schools is really a function of policies and practices at the local level, at the state level and I would argue as we'll point to even at the federal level. So it's both a function of the actions and policies at those levels but it's also a function of the inaction or the absence of policy. And we'll touch on that as well. So I'm gonna let you talk about that for a second but what I wanna do is tell you what we are going to do which is we're gonna take it back up and look nationally about what is being spent in the United States of America on school, our school infrastructure, our school facilities, right? What is spent on construction, on new construction, what's spent on modernization, how do we understand that but also what is spent on the maintenance and operations of that infrastructure. And I think the numbers will shock you but also the way in which those differ from state to state. So we'll look at that nationally and then what we'll do is and what we do in that is use kind of metrics or standards to understand both issues of equity but also I think what you can't decouple is issues of adequacy, right? So how do we know if we're spending enough to know that okay, these assets, these buildings, these places that children and teachers are sitting in every day are not going into disrepair under chronic investment and that's really important to understand and then we're gonna zoom in on my state which is California and understand how we look at that in a specific state and try to understand that and then based on the findings of all that we'll kind of wrap up by talking about the way in which we are working together currently to chart the course to remedy a lot of the problems that we're seeing and so looking at what's the role of local policies and practices and then what is the role of states? What is the role of the federal government? We think the role of the federal government can and should be but also then what are the possible roles of the nonprofit sector in this but also the private sector because the private sector whether they're construction management firms whether they're bond consultants whether they're architecture firms et cetera they're doing a lot of the work in all of that so we'll talk about that but I wanna make two points and then I'll turn it over to Mary which is we're trying to address two main challenges in this field. One, which Mary Elena has talked about which is really the structural deficit that we're seeing in this sector and two, what we would describe as kind of the underdeveloped nature of both the policy side and the practice side of managing our K-12 infrastructure sector or the school facilities and classrooms that we sit in. So with that I'm gonna turn it over to Mary. So I'm assuming that if I just go like that, yeah. So I am not a PhD. I have, I did study policy but I'm really a self-taught sleuth on education and so and partly you get to the point where data is very important because as a parent, as a mother organizing going before the council and the school board and whatever, you have really like, okay girls, right? Whatever, you know, you're complaining again, right? So we learned that data was absolutely critical. It was the most, the cheapest and most powerful thing that we could bring with us when our community went before public officials and that was true locally but frankly it's still true nationally and so we had to do some kind of forensics on this because there is no national database on school facilities. There is no national inventory. State by state there are not inventories or data on school facilities so we went looking for what we might find in order to answer these questions. Do we have enough money, right? Do we have enough money on the operating side and on the capital side and we keep talking about operating capital and it's because they're funded differently, they're different sources of revenue and it's very different at the district level. So we were asking, is there enough for operating our schools? Is there enough to build and maintain and renew our schools as major building systems deteriorate and fail and then we were curious, well, you know, what are the states and the federal government doing and is it enough? And in this, we did this report with the Center for Green Schools and the National Council on School Facilities and the National Council is kind of a new player on the block in that we have helped bring together state facilities officials. Now I have to say, Texas doesn't have one, but they did send a representative to one meeting who was very, very helpful and very interested but basically when, for example, when we asked them what's the square footage of the buildings in the state of Texas, they said, well, we don't really know. So we said, okay. But let me tell you, you ask California? They don't know either. So, you know, this is a problem. But anyway, they're a wonderful group of people who when you think about your departments of education, these are hardworking people who get no respect. The Center for Green Schools has been working on greening schools and I think of them as our industry partner. I think of us as civic government and industry, but I'm not sure if that's how they see themselves, but I think they are good connection to the building industry. So what we did is we analyzed spending. We looked at how to develop standards because even if you say, oh, this is a lot of money and especially when you're talking about billions, like, okay, it's just funny money. So what does it mean compared to what we should be spending? And so we did this, what's being spent? What are some standards that are state officials and that are the building industry from research would identify as valid? And so this is the data we used, right? So every year school districts fill out an F-33 and they've been doing it since, I don't know, I think since the 60s or something and they fill out, it's their fiscal data. The US Census of Governments collects fiscal data. So we went into it and said, okay, what are the little pieces of data that relate to school facilities? So they report on operations and maintenance of plant. Now it's not a great data point in that it's utilities, it's custodians, it's maintenance, it's repair and building security. So you can see it's got a lot of stuff on it. But it is a point and it's one that's consistently collected over decades. The other one is capital outlay and capital outlay is basically what, it's primarily what they've borrowed, what the districts have borrowed because they do report it and they account for it in their capital side, but it's school construction, land and existing structures, instructional equipment and other. Anyways, this is, I probably don't even have time for this but I'm gonna do a quick aside. So I was with a school district superintendent from Kansas the other day and I said, oh, good, I don't get the Kansas data. Everything's in other. Like you have nationally about 85% of it's in school construction and 15% of it falls into the other three categories, but you've got like 40 or 50% in other. And he said, oh, we've had problems in Kansas land. We have been borrowing to pay for utilities. We have been borrowing to pay for janitors. And so I thought, oh, that's a scary thought for that future of Kansas. But anyway, so we have had this fiscal data and we also then had over the two years we worked on this study, we worked very closely with about 25 of the state officials that are involved in the National Council. And we said, does this look right? You know, and there were some real problems with the data that we got corrected from them. So it's a challenge when you go straight from the F-33 data into the analysis. So we did a lot of work on some of that. But we also used, so Dodge Analytics. So one of the things that Jeff alluded to, but I think it's important to understand is that the building industry, the finance industry does a lot more study and a lot more work on K-12 facilities than the policy officials. And so it's kind of like they're holding the cards and we're just kind of going along. But so we use the Dodge Analytics where they track contracts. And we were using it again as a check for whether or not the locals and the states were what we reporting accurately. But with some of those caveats and with the data from the F-33, what we found, and this is in 2014 dollars, is that about a hundred billion a year gets spent for the last 20 years on school facilities. About half on capital construction. That's new construction. That's roof replacements. That's modernization. And then about half on the maintenance and operations of plant. And this was, we just did 2011 to 2013 average there because when you think about how much growth there's been, that if we average it across the whole period, it wouldn't reflect, we thought more honestly, what's actually happening. Now one of the things that, oh, it's flashing. Oh, interesting. So notice how big the orange pie piece and the orange and the green is education. It's what states are spending on K-12 and university and the second highest is highways. This is state and local spending. This does not include federal dollars. When you include federal dollars, it changes this, oh, I don't know what happened here. They've gotten somebody's hacked into this let's see, let me just do a slide show. I'll do from beginning and we'll just sort of work our way through it a little faster. So one of the things that's important to understand is that from a state and local perspective, K-12 on the infrastructure side is really important. And yet when the National Governors Association asked states to say what infrastructure they needed, there was no schools in it. Even though it's the second biggest category that they're funding, people do not think about schools as public infrastructure. So basically why did we spend so much money in terms of on the capital side? Enrollment growth, still projected to be more enrollment growth about new schools added, new health and safety standards. Lead paint was legal up until 1978 and most of the buildings were built before 1978. So we've got lead paint, we've got asbestos, we've got all kinds of things. We have had on the education side, lots of change in terms of special education, early childhood, class sizes, technology obviously and then a heightened notion of what security looks like. I mean, I don't know how many of you went into schools with metal detectors when you were kids, but my kids went to high schools in the District of Columbia where they went through metal detectors. So lot has changed and then the whole world around the school grounds, I mean, they've always been a community asset but they're really changing the structure of that. And as Mary Elena spoke to, we have virtually no federal dollars that it's a percentage of zero. And it's mostly FEMA. FEMA is the biggest federal funder of school facilities in the federal government, that's it. So, but the state share on the capital side, this is on average and you see this quite a variation, is about 8% over the 20 year period. But obviously on the operating side, you have a very different way that funding is done. I mean, there is a state, a significant state share and an important federal share to support and make sure that there's more equity on the local side. That's one I found really interesting. So this was another data point we found in there, which is how much debt, just local debt to school districts, now debt for school districts, long term debt is anything over a year. But for the most part, the only thing they're doing over a year is capital debt. So the national average is about 8,400. You see Texas there at 13,000. But South Carolina, which had a lawsuit because it was on local property tax, they now have a statewide property tax because of the inequity in South Carolina. But so you see that there's a lot going on on the debt side as Marilena also was able to see. And again, we had 12 states that were at zero. I think you identify 10, but in terms of over the last 20 years, and you can see the distribution, there's a, it's kind of a regionally inept look throughout, I mean, it's really varied. So that was sort of on the, what we did side, then on the standard side, we looked at, well, how much should we be spending? And what we, the CRV is the current replacement value. So what we did is had a replacement value. So what is it cost to build a new school? And we did it by state. So each state, because they're different, depending upon the regions, there's actually differences within states. But so we have the current replacement value for every state. And then we looked at what the percentage of in each of these areas for maintenance and operations, renewals and alterations, and then to reduce the deferred maintenance, which we know is at least about 300 billion. That, so what would happen? So this is then the comparison of the states. And this is both maintenance and operation and capital. Now you see that Texas, Georgia, and Florida, are up at, looks like, oh, they're doing great. What, when I look at this, what I know is that there's so much new construction that it has, if, what this says, is that if Texas didn't build any more schools, but continue to spend at the level they have been spending, that Texas would be able to maintain appropriately the schools that you have. Right, does that make sense? So this doesn't say, oh, you've taken care of them. What we're trying to do is project what do you need going forward? And are you spending enough on average going forward to take care of what you have, not to build new? And the reason Florida, Georgia, and Texas are at the high end is because they did so much new construction. So, all right, so that's a little bit of a quick flyover and then I'm gonna turn it over to Jeff and he's gonna bring us down to earth again. If California's considered earth. So, let's look at California really quickly and David, I'm gonna ask you to cut me off when I'm out of time, but I'll kind of go through this very quickly. But what we asked in California is that the state, over the last handful of years, the state pulled back in terms of its share of school construction funding and it had been giving out roughly about a billion dollars a year for the last like dozen years or so. In November, we just passed a $9 billion bond. So there's all kinds of discussions about that. We had a handful of years where there was no money and there was a big debate about whether or not the state was gonna be in that business anymore. And so we asked, can California school districts adequately and equitably fund their school facilities? And what we did was apply, let's get that, what we did was apply the same method of saying, okay, if you own a building, what should you be spending on it each year at a minimum floor on the operating side, M&O side, excuse the technology or the terminology here and on that capital side. Remember those come from different pots, okay? And we compared those, we set those benchmarks for every single school district in California, we have a thousand of them and then looked at what they had been spending for real in real life as my daughter would say for the years 2008 to 2012 on average. Only 38% of school districts in California each year met the M&O minimum benchmark. So the flip side of that is 62% of them were not on average on the capital side. Only 43% of districts met, what we, this is a terminology issue but this capital renewal benchmark which is basically like minimum capital expenditures every year, the boiler replacement or roof replacement as Mary alluded to. We could talk about the terminology in the discussion here. Only 43% of districts were doing that each year on average. Nearly 40% of districts fall short on both of these benchmarks. So they're under investing every year on both the M&O side of their facilities and on the capital facilities. And surprise, surprise, these districts have a lower property assessed value. Not surprising to David's comments earlier. School districts with higher assessed value spend more. Again, not surprising, but we need to know this, right? And this is the kicker here. And I'll come back to it. Districts with low income students spend more per student on M&O from their operating budget. I'm gonna come back to that because I think that's where we need to be like, whoa. Districts with high AV spend more. Not surprising. In these two charts I'm gonna show you, the blue is maintenance and operations spending and the green is capital. Just so you can see it. All the districts in California are divided into five groups. This is by assessed value. It's not surprising. This is the one I think that, this is the one that surprised us. Taking California's 1,000 districts dividing them into five groups based on the percentage of students in their district that qualify for free and reduced lunch. What we find is that this, what I call the highest poverty districts on my far right are spending more per student each year in blue on M&O and less on the capital side. So at first we thought, great. They're being good stewards. They're spending what they should be on the M&O side. But what we realized through doing interviews and looking more closely at the data and kind of ground truthing is like, what we think is happening is troubling, which is they're kind of undercapitalized and they're having to then pull out of their operating budget, which is the same budget that pays teachers, buys textbooks, et cetera, to do facility related things, perhaps their emergency repairs or other things that they don't have the capital to do. And this set a big single toss like, whoa, this is actually going against the recent change in kind of the education foundational program of funding in the state of California, the local control funding formula that has a more equitable, a much more equitable approach to a progressive approach to the way in which it hands money out to school districts. So this sent a big signal to us. I think I'll skip through this, but we actually have in California, we can talk about in discussion, but we now have what's called facilities in good repair as the education code calls it. And we've kind of, that's finally now, it's related to the Williams case that David mentioned earlier, but we actually now have it as something districts are supposed to kind of actually plan for and engage their communities in and we can talk about that in a second. But so I'll wrap up, David, if I can have one more minute. So what we're looking at, Mary and I are working with some of those other organizations that she mentioned earlier, sort of, okay, how do we get past this? And I think that there's issues around finance, certainly, well, you've got policies at the federal, state and local level that we need to improve or put into place and we need to investigate each of those levels and what's the appropriate role? Because really, you know, most of the states are local control. This activity around this thing called school facilities happens primarily locally, right? With the exception of a few states. So what is the appropriate local role? How do you build the capacity and sort of stewardship of local districts to be good owners and good stewards of their facilities? In all cases, right? And what's the appropriate role of states? And that may be a little bit different for each state, but increasingly, there's, you know, what's the federal role? And we can talk about that in the discussion, but on the fiscal environment, you know, it's issues around revenue options, as Mary Lane had talked about. And, you know, if you have data, you can understand your expenditure priorities, but also, what are the financing alternatives? And I think there's some finance people in the room. It would be nice to talk more about that. Maybe we'll mention that. But, you know, can we get more creative? Are there other things that we can do in between the spectrum of geobonds, perhaps, and pay-as-you-go, as Mary Lane mentioned? But, and then lastly, kind of on the practice side, you know, how there's so much work that needs to be done in terms of building the field around data, you know, getting data, you know, how do you manage that data? And as Mary mentioned, there's public engagement. You know, this is really kind of an activity that happens locally. And we think it's a really strong way, and we've seen it locally, for real strong engagement, for school quality, right? Not just for better buildings, as Mary said. The technical assistance around educational facility planning, et cetera, and you see those, we'll come back to those. And in order to figure out what the roadmap is for this, we, this fall, convened six working groups across the country on these issues around data and information planning, decision-making, accountability, funding, and management of school facilities. We had health equity advocates, education advocates, finance and real estate people, people who work in facilities, state legislator people, all working shoulder to shoulder, really understanding what's the problems in the sector, and what are the state, local, and federal policies that could affect that? And so what we're trying to do is really build a field of support for improving the sector. And so, you know, what we're focusing on, and we can talk about in this discussion, is really on the data and metrics, looking at a state role, what's a system where states can support, and that technical assistance is really important, because every district is doing this on their own, and they vary enormously in their ability to do that. And then we need to, thirdly, on the communication side, we really do need to build the public will around, whether it's around supporting high-quality physical learning environments as a core foundational part of quality schools. And so that public will translates into voting for local bonds, et cetera, but supporting that ongoing investment in these buildings that's needed that someone mentioned. So we're really working on that. And so that's what we're working on. Here's our contact info, but we'll have more discussion in the discussion, hopefully. And with that, I'll turn it over to you guys. Thanks very much, Jeff and Mary. And next we'll have Raul Villasenor again, the Managing Director of First Southwest Division of Hilltop Securities. Thank you, David, and welcome to everyone here this morning. I want to take just a minute to recognize, again, Al Kaufman, when I was on the school board in Edgewood, 80 to 86, and he was dealing with school finance as we had sort of directed him to do at that time. He was very helpful to the four or five, 30-somethings that were on the school board at that time. So Al, thank you again. For the state of Texas, the watershed moment in terms of school finance was 1997. Things dramatically changed in 1997. As a result, I believe Al, it was after Edgewood 4, when school finance was finally mentioned in that last opinion by the Texas Supreme Court. And so the legislature in Texas, who over the years has not done much with respect to public education, except when forced to, initiated the instructional facilities allotment program, and then followed that in 1999 with the existing delatment program that really changed the way and the ability of local school districts to finance facilities. So for you researchers, if you see sort of a bump up in bond financing for facilities that occurred in the late 90s, et cetera, as a result of that, it's not that we came across a big pot of money somewhere, but it was really finally the legislature getting right in the middle of school finance. Prior to that time, and I had been in this business at that time, probably going on 14 or 15 years, there was, as you might expect, a lot of deferred maintenance. And as Jeff pointed out, school districts, school administrators, and I don't know if there's any of those in the audience, are very, very reluctant, not because they don't want to, but because they really, particularly in Texas, need every nickel that's available on the MNO side to really do what they're supposed to be doing, and that's educating our kids. So it's rare that you'll find a school board that wants to do any level of pay as you go, because they know the downside of that. And that is it's going to somehow impact what's going on in the classroom. So there were billions of dollars, I'm sure hundreds of millions of dollars of deferred maintenance leading up to 1997. You had the typical deferred maintenance kinds of issues. There was problems with the air conditioning, if you had it. There were leaky roofs, falling, ceiling tiles, all kinds of things that you might expect from school districts that for many, many, many years just didn't have the money to reinvest in maintenance of facilities. I personally attended two elementary schools while I was being educated in Edgewood. One was constructed in 1955. There had been very little investment made when I showed up. And then the other elementary school I attended in Edgewood had been built in 1915. And it was actually the facility where they had elementary, middle school, and high school all in the same building. I wasn't there at that time. The middle school that I attended was constructed in 1940 and was the second Edgewood High School. But then finally I got to a great facility, Kennedy High School in 1966. That was a facility that was fairly new. It had been constructed in 1963. And the only reason Edgewood was able to afford to build a branded facility in 1963 was because they were able to submit a grant, get some civil defense funds. And so the high school was intended to serve. And I remember that was during Bay of Pigs and Cold War and all of that good stuff. And so the high school that I was fortunate enough to be able to attend after attending all those very old facilities for a long, long time was the brand spanking new Kennedy High School that was nicely air conditioned and all in one nice little rectangular box. But again, the local community could not have put together the resources on their own. I remember there was no state aid at the time to construct a brand new facility. It's just what, you didn't even think about that. In my travels across South Texas in the early part of my career, it was always obvious when you showed up at whether it was a small school district or rural school district because you could spot the buildings from a mile away. First of all, you look for the high school football stadium lights, right? That was sort of the beacon that you looked for because you knew that the high school, the elementary school and the middle school were close by and likely also that the administration office was pretty close to the football stadium. But again, if you were a low wealth district there wasn't much you could do with constructing new facilities. So what was happening is that local school districts were simply adding another box to the three or two boxes that were already on the school campus. And not because that was the most efficient way to be able to provide the needed facilities for the children at the time but that was the only thing they could afford to do. And so that's what you saw pretty much all across South Texas which is where I do most of my business. Programs that were available prior to 1997 and in the late 50s and early 60s were things like the WPA. Some of you, most of you probably don't remember that. And of course the various civil defense grants. We had two high schools in Edgewood that actually had basements to serve as civil defense facilities. And they were the two newer schools in the school district. So again, that's sort of what we were faced with not unlike all the other school districts in Texas but if you were from a property poor school district you weren't going to have very many new facilities or even maintained facilities or renovated facilities because there just wasn't the money to be able to do that. As an example, when I sit on the school board again in the 80s, early 80s we were about to change the world, right? And so we commissioned a facility study. The facility study identified $70 million worth of improvements. Not any new schools I don't think that I can remember were in the facility study that was presented. We went to the voters and asked them to authorize $8.5 million in bonds. And you say, well gosh, why didn't you do the whole thing? Well, because it was pretty obvious to us after we saw the numbers that the local taxpayers just couldn't afford a $70 million bond issue. So that's a stark example of needs being in the 70 to $80 million range and from a practical standpoint only being able to finance about $8.5 million of those needs at the time. In fact, at that time about the only opportunity that children had for sort of improving their lot and going to the nice schools was for your parents to be upwardly mobile and move to another school district. That was really the only way at that time that you were going to go to a decent school facility. In Bear County where we sit this morning there are 16 different school districts that are either wholly or partially within the Bear County territorial jurisdiction. And so there was a lot of upward mobility going on at the time and continues. And so that really was the only opportunity in my opinion for parents to improve a lot of their children in terms of school facilities. But then IFA came around in 1997 and when I first saw the legislation again as a result of Edgewood four I thought it was the best things in sliced bread because for the first time the state was going to be an active participant, not in the planning, not in figuring out what the needs were, but in simply providing in some way shape or form for the payment of the bond issues that were going to be issued over the next 20 to 25 years. By Edgewood four we had sort of divided the state into property poor and property rich school districts and thankfully IFA was really designed to greatly assist property poor school districts. And it really again for the first time created this partnership finally between the state and the local quote unquote independent school districts, although I never really understood how a district could be independent if they got 80 to 90% of the money from the state. There's not much independence there. There wasn't much then and I don't believe there's much now. So what it did though however is that it sort of forced local school districts to prioritize their needs, do their own planning, go to the voters and get these very, very large now bond issues approved, but with the comfort that there was going to be these great subsidy payments by the state. Otherwise they would have done continue to do what we did in the early 80s and that was to maybe finance six, seven, 8% of what your needs really were at the time. Thankfully the subsidies were sort of fixed in nature although there was a formula that allowed that number to move up and down but it really moved up and down only if your property values changed locally which is really in my opinion what was supposed to have been happening. The program however had to be designed such that it didn't conflict with one thing that is really great for Texas public school districts and that's their ability to be able to ask the voters when they approve a bond issue, the voters actually authorized the board to set the property tax rate in Texas that's called the interest and sinking fund tax rate which provides for the payment of the bonds. They could set that at whatever level is necessary to provide for the payment of the debt and that's very powerful and that is why Texas school bonds are sought after by investors all across the United States because it's hard to argue that this would be a bad investment when the local taxpayers can set that levy at whatever level is necessary to provide for the payment of the debt. It did require, IFA did require an application process so school districts did have to provide the state with sort of a list of the projects that they were going to construct. There was a minimal amount of data, I think there was three lines of data that they asked for, you know, the enrollment, the square footage, those simple kinds of things but there really wasn't much assistance from the state. Most of the information that was put together in terms of the application was really provided by the architectural firm that had been hired to do the design work for the facilities. Again, from the local tax base, if you wanted to put a proposition for the voters to authorize bonds for the IFA program, there was a limit. Obviously that's how they controlled the amount of money that they were able to distribute fairly widely. Thankfully, when your application was submitted after the deadline, the applications were sorted by wealth per ADA and so IFA was applied to the lower wealth school districts first until the money ran out and then you could apply the following year. All of that was great and in 1999 they followed IFA up with the existing debt allotment program which basically funded debt that was already outstanding so that you didn't have a group of school districts that maybe weren't ready to issue new debt under IFA but still could now get the state subsidy under the existing debt allotment program. And again, always going great until the Texas legislature decided that perhaps there was too much debt being issued in the state of Texas so they tried and continued to try and the legislature is in session until the end of this month so we never know how they're going to further limit independent school districts from financing their facilities needs but they've begun to do things such as limit the amount of pennies on the tax rate that can be set aside for bond payments. The biggest thing they've done to us which I believe has been very, very negative for most school districts is that they've now they now dictate to us what they call the uniform election dates and so we can now only take propositions to the voters for Saturday and May and the general election in November. There's further been a bill introduced in the legislature this year to limit that uniform election date to one. So that from a planning standpoint that makes it very, very difficult because then we're all sort of rushing to the field at the same time and what ends up happening as we saw happen in the early years of IFA is all the school districts would flood the bond market at around the same time because you had to sell your bonds, know what your bond payment was before you could set the tax rate for the coming fiscal year which typically is August 31st so we would flood the market, pay higher interest rates but everybody was happy because the state was paying a significant part of their bond payments. In closing, even in spite of the limitations that we continue to see imposed on us by the state legislature, school districts continue to fund new facilities not anywhere near the level that we were doing when IFA and EEDA were first introduced. The federal government got in the mix as well in 2009 with the AERA program, the jobs program and so for the first time the federal government other than through the grant program system assisted school districts, well municipalities in general, anybody that had jobs that could be created at the time by paying a certain portion of that debt service no sooner than that had happened than sequestration came into the fold and so a lot of those subsidy payments were reduced anywhere between six and eight percent. IFA will continue to be used if it continues to be funded because that's another way how they're controlling how much debt is issued by Texas independent school districts and we went I think four legislative session where there was zero new money put in IFA and so sort of that stopped a lot of the new construction going on in public school systems. The thing I worry about now and as mentioned by Jeff and Mary is now the maintenance of all those facilities we've built since 1997 because it is billions of dollars of facilities that we've constructed, renovated, improved. Now we have to figure out a way and as parents and as researchers and voters we have to ensure that our local public school systems are maintaining those great facilities we've built since 1997. Thank you for your time. Thank you very much Raul for those insightful words and seeing how this all unfolds at a state level. So next we'll open it up to questions from the audience if you all have any questions please. Are we using a mic for that or so do they go back there or? Thank you. My name is Albert Cortes. I'm the former policy director at IDRA and worked with our Coffman, David and Hossa, many of the people that were involved in the decades of litigation that we engaged in to try to get more equity in the school funding system in general. My question to all the panel and y'all can decide who might take it is it seems that one of the issues that emerged as I heard the discussion and having been retired now for about a year and a half I guess I get a fresh perspective and the step back kind of gets you an opportunity to look at the issue in somewhat of a fresh way. And is one of the challenges that we have is that historically we allowed the issue of maintenance and operation and facilities funding to be separated almost completely in many cases. And therefore, I know as we dealt with the legislature over many decades, the question that was posed to advocates for more equitable funding was do you want more funding on the maintenance side or do you want funding for your facilities equity issue? And so I guess my question to you is do you think that's an issue that is still there and if it's still there, how might we go about addressing that what I think is a false dichotomy because we know that if you need money on one side or the other as some of you all have pointed out do you just take from Peter to pay Paul? I like your opinion. The school districts accumulate, we can use it and have been using it to pay bonds on purpose. We're not able to do it, thank God. Now we go the other way. The M&O side of the question tell probably the biggest part of the tax rate that we've thought about since the second one. If you believe your M&O expenditures are not at the level that they should the last thing in the world you're going to think about is should I be using some of that money to maintain my facilities? Because if you do that and we should be doing something's got to give. I think that is that false dichotomy I think that had it with me. Yes. I probably stand up for just a second. So the question is really that relationship between the maintenance and operations that's spent on the operating side and the need to invest on a regular basis whether it's for enrollment change, growth, community change, but also the deterioration of a facility over time. And this it is in part a false dichotomy. I mean the debt on this is paid out of the operating budget side. It shows up as a line item. And I think at the end of FY 13, it was about 17 billion that school districts were paying for their debt service. So it shows up both in how you maintain it and also the fact that you're paying for your interest on the operating side. So I think that to me it's partly the way in which the public and even our school board members actually don't have a lot of understanding of the policy and the budget world around school facilities. And so I think part of what we've been doing in trying to get a bigger group together is to really raise the level of basic understanding of what's happening, how big it is, how decisions that people are making are gonna make a difference and get industry and officials and civic groups together just to raise the level of knowledge and information because I think that we can't wrestle with it, right? Until we understand it better. So for example, this is one of my ideas that is I tell people either it's terrible idea or it's a good idea. But as Jeff or a genius idea, who knows? You know, it could be horrible. And mostly I'm hearing from people that it's horrible except that the maintenance and operation in the very poor districts is very high because they're dealing with emergencies and they're overspending on maintenance and operations in fact, but not getting the value because they're under capitalized, they're under investing. So the roof leaks, well you keep patching it and patching it and patching it. So I have wondered whether or not states should be able to securitize a portion of their title one dollars. So okay, there's no local property tax capacity. The states aren't doing it. Could you take a portion of that? Could you make money locally by doing that? Now in the case of the Golden Massachusetts, they will fund 80% of a local district but the local district has to come up with 20. They are poor districts in Massachusetts that cannot come up with their 20%. So for them it would be a great deal to be able to securitize some federal dollars come up with their 20% in order to get the 80% from the state. But anyway, so there's a level of creativity I guess is really what I'm saying that I think we can get to if we put it out on the table but part of what, and then I'm gonna stop here, part of what you can see is school district people the ordinary people responsible for these facilities want to hide the conditions. They have no hope to address the problems of these conditions and so they just wanna hide them. They wanna hide the fact that the mice are running through. They wanna hide the lead in the water. They wanna hide all these things because there's no hope. And this is where I think the public has to give them some hope that we can come up with ways to address these problems so that they don't keep hiding them because they are really hiding them. Anyway, well I would just add to that. I mean you nailed the heart of it. In California we used to have a state policy that districts had to have restricted routine maintenance accounts and they had to spend at a certain level each year and a few years ago that got washed away in the name of flexibility and local control and I'm very concerned about that because the custodial and basic maintenance operations always loses out to an FTE teacher or an after school service or something and our ability to track the effects of that it doesn't show up right away so it's easy to kind of even hide at school board meetings and whatnot into parents but it builds over time and we have seen that a few years ago the state surveyed districts across the state of California when they were allowed to flex this money and 70% of them said that they were flexing over half of it into other things and something like 30% axed it down to zero for a year or two and that has a taxpayer I'm alarmed. Was that during the recession? Yes. Oh no, I just started talking to school districts in San Antonio on a newer study that I've been working on trying to figure out okay so how do school districts, practitioners figure out how to implement these policies because they're getting the policies from the state and they're trying to work with them the best they can and many of them benefit from working with wonderful people like Mr. Diaz-Signore who give them great advice but when I was asking them what do you do when they're economic fluctuations, they'll say we have to make these difficult decisions between teachers and facilities we're gonna cut back on our custodial staff that's how we got through the recession we're gonna cut back on how often we cut the grass we're going to cut back on all these things related to facilities and they know that it's bad but I mean when they're deciding between whether or not they're gonna have 30 kindergartners in the classroom they make these tough decisions and so I think that the way you framed it as a false dichotomy is really hard but we've set up the policies to create and you were there, you know, we set it up that way to create this system and it is a false dichotomy because yes of course teachers matter for teaching and learning but so do the facilities in which the learning happens and so to act as if they're not as important just it sets us up for these difficulties and I'm glad Mary brought up the issue of the lead pipes and flint but that's happening in all these other places and it got the publicity there but I mean these are just these ticking time bombs waiting to happen and so if you don't take care of your facilities you're going to have more expensive problems down the line and it's going to affect our property poor districts so I think that this is a critical question to talk about and why we need to spend a lot more time talking about maintenance and collecting that information. Are there any other questions? If so please go to the mic. Yeah, thank you very much and thank you for the plug Dr. Cortez is one of my teachers and all this he's also a graduate I guess with you from JFK. Was it 47? Well part of it is that, I'm sorry. I had two questions I think for all of you. One is, one of the difficulties of course in all these facilities issues is the difference between fast growing districts and declining size districts. I think Edgewood had 22,000 students at the time of Rodriguez and now has 13,000 and then we had Socorro ISD we represented had 7,084 and now has 35,000. So obviously new school that I just want to know how you sort of build that into your statistics and one more thing at the time the IFA was funded the poor school advocates all wanted all the funding to be weighted so that districts with high numbers of poor kids bilingual kids et cetera would get more funding per penny than did others and we could never get that through the head of the committee just plain didn't believe it and I was wondering if you have any data that might help support that idea about having the funding go out based on the needs of each district. I mean I know obviously funding has to go generally on needs but in terms of even if you have two poor districts one with high extra needs for students might get more per penny taxes than another district. Yeah, should I, can I sit? Is that okay? Is that right? I can't see everybody there. So first on the issue of new construction as it competes, I want to be able to see everybody new construction as it competes with the needs for existing facilities is a major, major issue because in a lot of rural communities that are losing population in urban centers that are losing population what we could see is the suburban growth and the other ex-urban growth was absolutely prioritized. The notion of 40 kids in a class and the crowding absolutely trumped the districts where enrollment was declining but the conditions were horrendous and so we think that that is a huge problem that has to be really addressed both at the state and the local level but we also think that a federal role and if the feds are gonna talk about infrastructure and they're gonna talk about rebuilding some of our distressed communities these are communities that we're talking about where the school might be a 200 student school that's left, the only real public asset left in that community but they have no tax base in order to support it. Anyway, so I can't say that I have a solution for it but I think that it is a major issue. In terms of waiting kind of other things one of the part of the importance of the data and the information. When we were involved in the master planning for the District of Columbia and we said, look it, you have to wait for the needs of the kids not just the needs of the buildings and partly you do that because there's all kinds of need and a building that's serving a more affluent population that can be in poor condition maybe isn't as high a need as a building in poor condition that's serving kids that live in poor conditions and go to school in poor conditions and really have far less to support them in their lives. So if you've got the data you can analyze and wait that because there's not enough money to go around so you're gonna have to prioritize. So you have other categories to prioritize with but it really gets back to Maria Elena's point that how do you have formulas? How do you manage those formulas? How do you set them up? But you absolutely can do it based on the needs of the buildings and also the needs in those communities and with those kids. Yeah, unfortunately, Al, we've got to sort of dance with who brung us and one way to approach the issue of sort of trying to wait more heavily one type of student in a particular school district to others is you deal with what you've got when IFA was created the way they limited the amount of debt that could be issued is you multiplied the students that were counted in terms of refined ADA not to be confused with weighted average daily attendance not to be confused with wealth per ADA but you use the refined ADA number and you multiply it by $250 and that was your annual limit and then that annual limit got subsidized by the state and so my suggestion would be is that we just deal with that dollar limit instead of $250 maybe we kick it up to 275, 300, 400 and that's a different way to approach the waiting aspect because school finance already on the MNO side is a monstrosity by design, by the way and so I would prefer that we not overly complicate IFA and ADA but simply deal with the factors that are available. The other thing that folks should do is when we took control of the Edgewood School Board in the late 70s, early 80s is we made it a point to move our school board meetings around to every campus in the school district because we knew that that would force the rest of the school board to see the facilities. They were invited to show up at the board meeting 15, 30 minutes before the start of the meeting and the principal was supposed to sort of walk them around walk them around whether it was rodents running a crowd I don't remember any rodents running across the floor but that's a good way for school boards to sort of understand what the needs of the facilities are, let them see it, okay. That was one way that we approached that issue. Yeah, can I just add one thing real quick? I think, you know, the deeper discussion on the formula and good formulas is needed and we've been looking at them, every state's is different, those that do have a formula, right. But understanding need is so complicated and we've been having discussions trying to assist the legislature in California on that because we're largely a competitive first come first serve approach on the capital side and so there's very much disagreements about what defines need. But there's also, you know, I like Colorado's formula because it both takes consideration of, you know, students and their characteristics as well as the building characteristics and local wealth characteristics. I'm not saying it's perfect, but I think it's interesting in terms of the data that it uses, but I do think in California there's very, and I would say across the states, very, very much a concern about how does the state not set up, incentivize you as a district not to invest in your facility so that it gets so bad that the state then comes in. So how do you reward and incent and leverage local strong effort to invest? And that's been an ongoing conversation in California that we haven't put into law or requirement and it's a real struggle. So what we wanna do very briefly, we have about five minutes to do this next quick activity, but we'd like for you to turn to your neighbor and for about two minutes each to share what you grew up in in your facilities. You know, what was the conditions that you witnessed either in your own facilities and or, you know, and it's okay if they were great. I mean, it's okay. You know, we do have some really good, we do have some really good, you know, facilities that people grew up in, but also what you might have witnessed. So, you know, I never knew how bad we had it in Edgewood schools until I went for UIL competitions at other schools. And then I was like, oh, wait a second, this is the way schools are, or you go to play in other stadiums or gyms and you find out, wow, this is air conditioned and wow, this is, you know, so some of the little things that you don't really think about. But, you know, again, you know, we like to have, you know, some interaction. So turn to your neighbor. Hopefully you're not from the same location as your neighbor, but share very briefly and then we'll ask a couple of you to report back to us. So you've got about two minutes each. If you can please do that, thank you. Thank you, I would have, because yesterday I forgot to do that. Well, now we're all in like close, we were like close to the end of the year. No, it's perfect. And so, we would be, we had to go around telling everybody, okay, it's time now, so you went to work. We had, we were all taking pictures. Great, so I have a photo of me with a tiny little fat guy and he's the one that we're literally seeing. So I'm gonna go and help him out. I'm gonna tell him that. I'm gonna tell him that. Yeah, we're just talking about the DOD, okay. That's true, that's true. That's completely separate, yeah. You're fine. About one minute. I don't know what it is, but thank you. I think that's probably the one. Okay, I know it seems like y'all are having wonderful discussions, you know, and I'm glad that we were able to push this forward, but if we can have you wrap up your discussions, please. All right, I was gonna do the double clap, even though I'm never a teacher, you know, but I appreciate it, and we're really glad that you all are, you know, involved, that we really wish we could have left a little bit more time. We did plan on having a little bit more time, but of course, you know, as we're discussing these issues and there are questions, we're really engaging in questions and an incredible panel that we've had today. You know, we still only have so much time, unfortunately. So before I volunteer to anybody, would anybody like to volunteer what they heard from their neighbor? Very briefly, yes, ma'am. Hi, Cynthia Euline from San Diego State University. We talked about, in both of our experiences, being in pretty standard facilities and no special spaces. So the gym would double for any performances, special events, or the cafeteria. Cappatorium. Not even cafeteria, it's just the cafeteria and you move the tables around. And then also traveling teachers. We both experienced. So there wasn't a music room, there was a music teacher with a cart and the same with art. Quickly, I just want to say, one of the things that I do at San Diego State is to direct the National Center for the 21st Century Schoolhouse. I've worked in this research for a couple of decades now. I'm so appreciative to IDRA for funding, research, and for sponsoring this symposium. We were told in 2007 when we did a symposium on facilities in Chicago at ARA that it was the first of its kind. We still have researchers who are not helping us. I just had an article to review that was responded that your assumption seems to be that facilities have something to do with student performance. And there's research that suggests otherwise. And there are four or five major studies that are flawed significantly in their methodology. But to have this issue come forward in this really important way, thank you. Thank you, Sharon. And I think for those folks who try to zero in, especially on test scores and the impact of facilities, now certainly there is research that says otherwise, right? But there's a lot more about building comprehensive, excellent schools. It's not about just one piece. And so I think that research is incredibly misleading. Does anybody else want to volunteer? About what they heard from their partner? I'm going to volunteer this gentleman since you're in the first row. Oh, I think they want you to go to the mic if you don't mind. We had a surprisingly complete, I think, cross-section of what's happened in the past several decades among just three people. I grew up in a small town in West Texas. And I think that they are what we're talking about now. I think that the facilities were, I would characterize them as fine. They were not amazing. We didn't have amazing athletic facilities on purpose because it spent the money on the schools. But the people in towns like that don't look like me anymore. And I don't think that the people who lead the town know what to do about that. I choose to be charitable. It may be that they're doing exactly what they mean to do. But I hope not. And then we have a case study from South Carolina about integrating a public school or not based on community pride. Your parents told you not, you would not go there. You'll go where we have always gone and where we know the quality of what we're going to get. And then the suburbanization, a Chicago case study. And I think we all know enough about Chicago case studies to know what that was like. They need to wrap up now? Is that right? All right. Well, I don't get to volunteer with anybody else. Which I thought was one of the best benefits of being a moderator. So again, I really thank you for participating here. We really want this, at IDRA, we don't do things just to do things. We really want some action to go out there. We really want to help connect people. So we have some expert panelists who have been doing this a number of years. We have people who have been doing this on the technical side and understand it. And we have a new researcher, wonderful researcher, Marielena, who is just so eager. She brought so much energy to our office in the one month that we were there. And she shows a lot of promise. But there's a lot of you out there that are doing work in this or are concerned about this. We really want to do something about this. And so we again, have our materials available on our website, the PowerPoints. We have the full study. How many pages? About 118 pages. It's now available in its entirety on the website. We have the executive summary that's available on our website. We have the other PowerPoints that were made available here, available on our website. And we have a link to the live stream by Nowcast, who has supported us here today again. And we really encourage you to use those. And if you have questions about following up, there's the contact materials there. And please reach out to us. I'm the National Director of Policy IDR right now. I'm happy to help facilitate some of what's going on here. We're hoping ourselves to kind of push some more vigorous state planning here in Texas and in other places that we would like to support. Our Equity Assistance Center now serves states all across the South, excluding West Virginia and Kentucky, where we assist school districts through our federally funded Equity Assistance Center on many issues. And so we have, and I mentioned that, mostly because not because we do a lot of facilities work outside of school desegregation cases that still exist today, but because it's allowed us to engage in a lot of other states and communities that we haven't previously done. You know, in states all the way, you know, to Florida, all the way up the coast to Virginia and including D.C. So we, again, you know, look forward to, you know, pushing this forward. There's a lot of ground work that has been done. There's a lot of ground that we still need to cover moving forward. And lastly, I want to invite all of you and even those of you online who might be watching this and are here in the local area to come to a reception hosted by IDRA, the Southern Education Foundation out of Atlanta, Georgia, an organization with over 150 plus years of education advocacy and civil rights advocacy and social advocacy as well. And the art lady of the Lake University, also located here in San Antonio. It will be from 7 to 9 p.m. in the third floor. The bottom room in the Grand Hyatt will have refreshments available and appetizers available. So please come and join us. Don't let us waste that wonderful food that we'll have prepared. We'll engage in more discussion and those of you who want to stay here a little bit afterwards, we still have the room. You're certainly welcome to engage the panelists. So again, thank you very much for your participation in this and let's move forward. Thank you. Hi, I'm Sarah. Alright, she wants to pose a lot. I can get somewhere in my mouth open. That's why I have so many. That's really cool. Nice. Yeah, I can't wait to be here. Yes. Thank you. That should be the next one. Thank you. Thank you. I guess we have to get it. Sure. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.