When basketball coach Cleve Roberts took a Miami Norland team to play at Miami Jackson Senior High a few years ago, they encountered a new $70 million facility with shiny glass and fresh paint.

“One of my players got off the bus and he said that ‘This looks like an ‘A’ school,’ ” Roberts recalled.

At Norland, it smells like a toilet in one hallway. Behind a building, a leaky pipe leaves a puddle where mosquitoes breed. Some teachers complain their classrooms smell like mold.

For more than five years, Miami Norland has waited for a $69 million replacement campus. Roberts counts four other schools that have remodeled or replaced their buildings, such as Carol City Senior High three and half miles away.

“We’re the last of the worst,” Roberts said. “There’s always a high standard set for education, but this is what they have for our kids. I don’t know whose fault that is.”

Blame the boom-to-bust real estate cycle of the past 10 years, the recession and voters’ mandate to reduce the number of students in classrooms — all contributing to a shortage of school funds. Miami Norland highlights problems found across South Florida public schools.

Miami-Dade, the nation’s fourth-largest school district, is broke in terms of capital dollars, according to its chief financial officer, and has at least $1.7 billion on its books for unmet capital needs and deferred maintenance for its schools and facilities.

In Broward, the nation’s sixth-largest school district, there are $1.8 billion in unmet facilities needs.

In both districts, schools have old air-conditioning units, outdated electrical systems that don’t meet high-tech needs, leaky plumbing, peeling paint and aging roofs.

Half of Dade schools are 40 years old or more. More than a third are more than 50 years old. Schools that were built during the last construction boom in the ’70s and early ’80s are in need of updating.  In Broward, close to 40 percent of schools were built before 1970.  

It’s not about cosmetics. Wear and tear in classrooms can hamper students’ learning, like when a noisy AC unit drowns out a teacher. Peeling paint around windows can let in water and undermine a structure. And when the AC goes out in a windowless classroom?

“This is a safety to life issue,” said Dade’s chief facilities officer Jaime Torrens. “It’s not just that it’s going to be uncomfortable, it’s going to be unpleasant. No, no, you cannot conduct classes in a windowless school with no air-conditioning.”

But Torrens’ biggest concern is equity.

“We have new schools where students have access to the best technology, and the teachers have the latest instructional tools, and right down the street you could have a 60-, 70-year-old school that is lucky to have two or three computers in a classroom, no smartboards, no audio enhancement and an AC that’s noisy in a classroom.”

In Broward, a 2000 federal lawsuit exposed issues of inequity in spending between newer schools in the western part of the county and older schools in the east. While the district has since closely tracked spending to ensure parity, some parents say the budget crisis has hampered progress on restoring older schools.

“There are still gaps to address,” said Roland Foulkes, chairman of the Broward school district’s diversity committee.