Many districts with bustling main streets and abundant resources can erect gleaming modern facilities, while districts with boarded-up storefronts and with little property wealth have little to nothing set aside to patch up crumbling infrastructure. Moreover, low-poverty districts spent about $1 billion more on school construction than high-poverty districts in 2016, which comes to 41 percent more per student.Īcross the United States, funding for education is largely a local endeavor. More than 40 percent of school districts need to update or replace the ventilation systems in at least half of their schools, according to a report by the Government Accounting Office. States have no reason to be surprised by the sharp divide in children’s access to their schools. Nationally, school closures forced 41 percent of districts with a high concentration of students living in poverty into offering remote-only instruction this fall, while only 24 percent of districts with a low concentration of students living in poverty kept their doors closed to in-person instruction, according to a report by the Center on Reinventing Public Education. Photo by Rory Doyle for The Hechinger Report The fallout has left families scrambling for child care and students struggling to keep up with remote learning.ĭue to the lack of funding, maintenance staff continue to patch - rather than replace - the leaky roofs at Williams-Sullivan Middle School in Durant, Mississippi. Schools serving these students were much more likely to remain closed this fall, in part because old buildings were deemed unsafe for both children and teachers during the pandemic. The consequences are especially dire for Black and Latino children and for low-income children of all races. Now, like districts across the country, it is seeing the spread of the coronavirus expose a crisis of crumbling and dilapidated school buildings brought on by decades of underfunding and neglect. Paterson, which serves mostly low-income families, has struggled to find the money to repair its buildings. “If they did more upkeep on the buildings, the teachers would have been able to teach them in the buildings.” doesn’t work in the summer there’s mice running around,” she added. “It’s cold in those buildings in the winter and then the A.C.
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