Equitable School Facilities
Today’s challenges require our public school facility infrastructure to meet new demands:
Ensuring education quality and equity; overturning community and racial injustice; expanding early education; and being a focal point of local infrastructure that supports community health, well-being, and climate resilience in a carbon neutral future.
Why School Facility Infrastructure Matters: Equity & Adequacy
The conditions and qualities of school facility infrastructure matter to children, families, and communities. School facility inequity was a major complaint in the 1954 Brown v Board of Education case and remains a problem in communities across America today. Decades of research confirm that the conditions and qualities of school facilities can positively or negatively impact students, teachers, and overall academic achievement. The facilities are not the most important aspect of school quality, but they are foundational.
And yet, every day, millions of elementary and secondary school children in the U.S. attend public schools with deteriorated and obsolete facilities that undermine achievement, harm health, and are not climate resilient.
Overcoming Policy Challenges
Capital funding for public school facility infrastructure remains the most regressive element of public education finance.
State and local policies, guidelines, and practices for public school facilities remain under-developed and largely disconnected from education equity, health equity, and overall community resilience.
The process of planning, advocating for, and designing school facilities can build social capital and foster the rebuilding of trust with communities undermined by discrimination and neglect.
CC+S’s work aims to remedy inequitable finance structures and link planning and investment decisions in ways that leverage co-benefits across education, health, and climate.
Featured Publications
Gauging Good Stewardship: Is California Adequately and Equitably Investing in its Public School Facilities?
Climate-Resilient California Schools: A Call to Action
Education Equity Requires Modern School Facilities
Are California Public Schools Scratch-Cooking Ready? A survey of food service directors on the state of school kitchens
Financing School Facilities in California: A 10-year Perspective
Education Equity Requires Modern School Facilities
Partners
At CC+S, we collaborate extensively with on-campus and off-campus partners across the public, private, and civic sectors.

The [Re]Build America’s School Infrastructure Coalition (BASIC) is a non-partisan coalition of civic, public sector, labor, and industry associations who support federal funding to help under-served public school districts modernize and build K-12 public school facilities. We believe that ALL children should attend healthy, safe, and educationally appropriate school facilities. It’s BASIC.
BASIC was formed in late 2016 under the leadership of the 21st Century School Fund, the National Council on School Facilities, the Center for Cities + Schools at UC Berkeley, and the Center for Green Schools @ USGBC.
Climate Ready Schools Coalition of California // #climatereadyschools
In the spring of 2022, a group of education, climate, health, youth, and labor leaders began collaborating to share policy priorities and develop common state policy and budget asks in support of #climatereadyschools for California’s most vulnerable students. Since the initial working group meetings, the Coalition has grown from a handful of organizations to 30 diverse groups representing various perspectives on education and climate policy.