Classrooms get wet.
When it rains, not every Arizona classroom stays dry.
Teachers and administrators use garbage cans to catch the water. They cover desks in tarps. They clean up broken ceiling tiles.
In the Dysart Unified School District in Surprise, 16 schools out of 26 were experiencing some kind of leak because of Wednesday’s rain, spokeswoman Renee Ryon wrote in an email.
Teachers and school leaders complain that water often leaks into Arizona classrooms as buildings age and fail. More than half of Arizona’s district school buildings were built before 2000, according to data from the School Facilities Board. Older school buildings usually have more needs. The board does not track the age of charter school buildings.
Schools ask for funding help
The School Facilities Board doles out Building Renewal Grants to pay for repairs and new schools. That grant money and the board’s funding comes from the governor and state Legislature. Eight voting members appointed by the governor sit on the board and vote on many of the repairs.
Dozens of schools have asked state officials to fund weatherization and roof repair projects over the past several years, according to the Arizona Auditor General. Weatherization keeps school buildings water-tight.
In budget years 2017 and 2018, SFB awarded $30 million in Building Renewal Grants to fix roofing issues and $18 million to fixes to surfaces, which include weatherization and flooring repairs, according to the Auditor General.
Leaking at Dysart High School in a classroom building and the school gymnasium is the district’s biggest issue, Ryon wrote. Repairs funded by SFB were already underway when it started raining.
In Phoenix’s Creighton School District, water leaked through the roofs at two schools — Excelencia School and Gateway School, spokeswoman Emily Waszolek wrote in a news release.
The SFB is working with the district to assess the roofs, she wrote. Creighton will then have to return to the agency to request funding to replace the roofs through the grant process.
In eastern Arizona, the roof at Pima Junior High was leaking, Pima Unified Superintendent Sean Rickert told The Arizona Republic in a text message. The school patched the roof a few years ago, but the leak has returned.
“That’s all there was money to do, so now we are back in the same position again,” he wrote.
Lawsuit over funding
For years, school officials have sounded alarm bells over aging school infrastructure. When teachers walked out of their classrooms protesting low salaries and classroom funding in the spring of 2018, they posted stories of stained carpets and leaking ceilings.
Several school districts together filed a lawsuit against the state and School Facilities Board over what they claim is an unequal system for helping schools in disrepair. The lawsuit is still creeping through the legal process.
Attorneys for the schools have said school districts in wealthier areas can fix roofs and tripping hazards like uneven sidewalks or worn carpet with funds from local taxes. Schools in lowincome areas cannot and are left to wade through the School Facilities Board’s grant process.
That system has led to grave facilities problems in Arizona schools, cutting into learning, the lawsuit claims.
Two schools in the Glendale Elementary School district, one of the lawsuit’s plaintiffs, were temporarily shuttered in 2016 because the district found structural deficiencies in the school buildings. A structural engineer, in a letter to the district, wrote at the time that he couldn’t say with certainty whether it was safe to occupy buildings at either school.
At a school district in the tiny town of Ajo, a playground was shut down for more than a year because of sinkholes.
The lawsuit alleges that the state’s school finance system doesn’t allocate funding specifically for building repairs and other capital needs. While some school districts can ask voters to approve property taxes for those needs, less wealthy districts can’t get bond approval.
This isn’t the first time Arizona’s faced a legal battle over school finance. In response to litigation decades ago, the Legislature created the process Dooley recalled, a now-defunct building renewal formula to address facilities issues.
But, the latest lawsuit alleges, state legislators soon abandoned that system, instead creating the Building Renewal Grant fund. The result is school districts shorted by millions of dollars, the lawsuit claims.
“The amount of annual funding appropriated to the building renewal fund is trivial when compared to the overall capital needs of school districts in Arizona on a statewide basis,” reads the lawsuit’s complaint.
The state Legislature sent about $80 million in this budget year to the School Facilities Board to fund repairs for crumbling schools through the Building Renewal Grants.
According to the lawsuit, the old building renewal formula would have provided about $260 million annually to school districts for repairs and replacements.