Public Trust

Planning, designing, constructing and keeping a facility in acceptable condition are formidable tasks. For most, garnering the necessary support to fund these projects may be an even bigger task. The perceived failure of our current education system has made the public wary of supporting future investments in education. The tendency to dwell on the negative has resulted in questions being raised about leadership, responsibility and accountability — making it more difficult for institutions to gain the public’s trust and needed financial support.

To regain that trust and support we can provide data gathered by our planning and evaluation processes; data that can help manage risk and prove need. On the facilities side, this includes the development of comprehensive facility master plans, capital improvement plans, post-occupancy evaluations and the use of facility condition indexes to help determine relative condition and prioritize need.

Often, the first challenge faced is convincing leadership that resources should be spent on a comprehensive planning process. Today’s educational institutions are serving a much broader population. They are becoming community centers, and facilities for early childhood programs, job training/retraining and workforce development. Local citizens should have a voice in the type of educational facilities planned for their communities. This collective vision will result in a facility that represents the needs of and is the collective responsibility of the community; and is supported by all of the people who helped create it.

It is also important to understand that the job is not done when a new building opens. Then comes the need for post-occupancy evaluations, facility condition assessments and the development of a capital improvement plan. Post-occupancy evaluations can reveal limitations in the current design and prevent costly mistakes in the future.

The recent recession wreaked havoc on education funding. Jobs were lost, the construction of new facilities decreased, maintenance of existing facilities was deferred. Unfortunately, facility systems can only last so long. The trend has shifted from building new to taking care of what we have, reducing deferred maintenance and prioritizing projects.

To regain financial support for education we first need to regain the public’s trust. Community involvement in the planning process and defensible data are needed to support and frame the messages we send — messages that must be sent by educational leaders who display competence, exhibit integrity and are true to their word.

This article originally appeared in the issue of .

Featured

  • i-PRO, NovoTrax Partner for New School Emergency Response Solution

    i-PRO Americas, Inc., which manufactures edge computing cameras, recently announced a partnership with NovoTrax, provider of end-to-end life safety and mass notification solutions, to address gaps in emergency response workflows at K–12 schools, according to a news release.

  • Ancient Resilience: How Indigenous Intelligence Shapes the 4Roots Education Building

    As climate change intensifies, educational spaces must evolve beyond basic sustainability toward true resilience – we must design environments that can adapt, respond, and thrive amid shifting, and intensifying, climate hazards. Drawing on indigenous wisdom and nature-based strategies, integrating resilient design offers a path to create learning environments that are not only functional but deeply in tune with their natural surroundings.

  • K–12 Safety Trends Report Reveals Reliance on Training, Technology

    Wearable safety technology provider CENTEGIX recently released its 2025 School Safety Trends Report, according to a news release. The report is based on more than 265,000 incidents during the 2024–25 school year as reported through the CENTEGIX Safety Platform, used by more than 800 school districts across the U.S.

  • Key Considerations for Office-to-Higher-Education Facility Conversions

    Since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, office-to-alternative-use conversions have become a recurring subject of urban development discourse. Office utilization rates across major U.S. cities remain below 50%, with vacancy rates exceeding 27% in San Francisco and 16% in New York. Higher education facilities present programmatic and spatial use cases that align readily with the typical characteristics of commercial office buildings.

Digital Edition