California is in the middle of a major policy shift for school facilities. The passage of Proposition 2 in November 2024 created a new requirement: to access School Facility Program (SFP) funding, districts must have a current Facilities Master Plan (FMP). FMPs are a central tool for shaping where capital spending flows and how well districts are positioned to weather the challenges ahead.

As this requirement takes effect, what is the current state of district facility planning—how many districts will need to launch a process to update or create a plan? That’s the question we set out to answer.

The Project

In fall 2025, a UC Berkeley Data Discovery research team worked with Ten Strands and the Center for Cities + Schools to conduct the first statewide analysis of publicly available FMPs. The work was motivated by a straightforward observation: the quality and coverage of existing plans varies enormously—with significant implications for students and communities.

CC+S and Ten Strands, with the support of students, did a comprehensive search of California’s 936 school districts to identify publicly-available facility master plans.  We found that— as of December 2025—only 264 districts—about 29 percent—had a plan posted publicly. The team then developed a scoring rubric covering seven components of plan quality, from facility inventory and enrollment planning to climate risk, energy resilience, and outdoor greening. Using a large language model (GPT-4.1-mini) calibrated against manual review, they scored 208 PDF-format plans against that rubric, producing the most comprehensive assessment of California school facilities planning to date.

What We Found

Coverage is uneven in ways that compound existing inequities. FMP adoption scales with district size: nearly all districts with more than 30,000 students have plans, while fewer than 6 percent of the smallest districts (under 1,000 students) do. Urban and suburban districts account for roughly 75 percent of publicly accessible plans, even though they represent less than half of all California districts. Only about 8 percent of rural districts have a public FMP.

Proposition 2 requires a plan adopted within the past five years. As of today, fewer than 12 percent of California’s districts appear to meet that standard.

On traditional facility planning components, most districts perform well. Nearly all scored plans (95 percent) earned top marks for facility inventory and financial planning, and 90 percent scored high on enrollment projections. These are the components that bond campaigns have long demanded—documenting facility conditions, estimating project costs, identifying educational needs, and making the case for investment. Districts have had decades of practice in this type of planning, which is reflected in higher scores on these components.

But the same plans struggle with the components that will define whether schools can meet the next decades of challenges. Climate risk is the lowest-scoring component by a wide margin: 14 percent of scored plans make no mention of climate at all, and nearly half acknowledge it only in passing—a generic sentence or two without any substantive assessment or strategy. Just 14 percent score at the top tiers. Energy efficiency and outdoor greening show similar patterns: both are mentioned in many plans, but few plans treat them as a strategic priority.

Read More

The full report—The State of Facilities Master Planning in California’s TK-12 School Districts: With a Special Emphasis on the Integration of Environmental Sustainability and Climate Resilience—is available here. The Ten Strands data initiative page, which includes interactive dashboards exploring FMP adoption by county, locale, and region, is available here.