Posted on Sat, Feb. 11, 2012

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In both districts, schools have old air-conditioning units, outdated electrical systems that don’t meet high-tech needs, leaky plumbing, peeling paint and aging roofs.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

Topping the nearly $2 billion bill for the Dade district: aging air-conditioning units; outdated electrical systems; and everything that makes up a building’s shell — the windows, roofs, painting and more. That includes $463 million for building upgrades, like roofing and windows. Heating, ventilation and air-conditioning needs total $332 million. Electrical needs, including fire/safety, add up to $293 million, and plumbing, $275 million. The district is updating its survey of needed repairs and maintenance, which it does every five years.

Highlights from Broward’s list include $472 million for building replacements, $118 million for kitchen/cafeteria renovations, $111.4 million for classroom additions and $59.3 million for safety equipment like sprinklers and fire alarms.

Both districts keep up with problems that pose risks to students’ life or safety.

But in March 2010, cracks in concrete walls and columns at North Dade Middle caused an emergency. Days before students were scheduled to take the FCAT, officials shuttered the Opa-locka school because of concerns over the structural integrity of several buildings with cracks.

The 700 students had to move to another campus. They now study in older buildings at Carol City Senior High. The district is still working on North Dade Middle. With some buildings dating to 1957, the school had been slated to be demolished and replaced by 2011. Torrens said the school will reopen this year, with new classrooms, cafeteria, main office and new drop-off areas.

He doesn’t believe that kind of hazard is likely to occur at another campus. “At any point, that could happen, but I don’t expect that level of deterioration in our schools. You hear the schools are crumbling, yeah they’re crumbling, but we’re not going to allow students to be in an unsafe [building].”

American Senior High, Miami Norland Senior High, Hialeah Senior High and M.A. Milam K-8 Center need the most work, according to school district records.

Maintenance workers worry that small problems grow into bigger ones, especially with fewer people in their department. Last April, the district laid off 200 employees in facilities. Broward has lost more than 600 such jobs over the past five years.

That means there are fewer people to do routine maintenance, said Chuck Burdeen, executive director of the Dade County School Administrators’ Association. For example, checking trees on school grounds. Old trees topple and can cause damage or injury. In recent months, trees have fallen at Coral Terrace Elementary, the adult-education English Center and Southwest Miami Senior High.

“We’re worried someone could get really injured,” Burdeen said, adding: “If they gave us the money tomorrow, we couldn’t do the work because we don’t have the people.”

 

Leaky roofs, old AC

On rainy days at 60-year-old Stranahan High School in Fort Lauderdale, students walk carefully through the halls, dodging a patchwork of roof leaks.

School custodians pump pools of water from the cafeteria and auditorium, and ceiling tiles are often removed and laid out to dry in a storage room, out of concern that they will absorb too much water and come crashing down.

Built in 1951, Stranahan was in line to receive a $22 million overhaul in 2010, but the project, along with hundreds of others in Broward, was shelved that same year.

“How are we keeping things together?” said Principal Deborah Owens. “With duct tape mostly. We’ve been jerry-rigging everything we can, so we can function.”

In 2006, Miami Norland did get a new gym. But the district just this year budgeted $500,000 for the design of the new main campus. And that new gym is already dealing with problems. Doorframes show cracked sheetrock. Metal siding stretches across the walls so that the bleachers — too wide — don’t scrape when pulled out for games.

“If you look at our five-year plan five years ago, Norland should have had a new school by now — if we had the money to do it,” Torrens said. “It was always our intent to do it. We recognize the need there. It’s been a patchwork.”

 

Unmet needs

At G.K.E. Sabal Palm in North Miami Beach, fourth-grade teacher Sandra Raines said her students complain of headaches and feeling sick in the portable classroom. The glass window slats don’t keep in the cooled air. And Raines said it often smells moldy. She showed her classroom to Vice President Joe Biden in September when he came to South Florida to stump for the Obama Administration’s Jobs Bill.

At Northeast High School in Pompano Beach, air-quality checks are conducted several times a month in the summer and spring because the school’s AC is constantly breaking down, Principal Jonathan E. Williams said. The checks are done to make sure mold is not accumulating, potentially causing a health hazard.

The school is waiting for funds to become available for a $28 million replacement facility. Until then, workers nurse the aging chiller that shuts down four to five times a month during the warmer months.

“It’s a challenge,” Williams said. “But what I tell my parents is, ‘It’s not the age of the building, it’s what’s going on inside of the building.’ ”

Fairlawn Elementary School in Miami, is getting $800,000 in improvements to its older buildings, which date to 1951. A lot of the wood near the window frames is rotted, and the white paint with turquoise trim is peeling.

“If it rains a lot, water comes into our classroom, and there are termites and ants. You do things to protect the children, but nature is nature,” said third-grade teacher Maria Escribano.

Last fall, U.S. Deputy Secretary of Education Tony Miller visited Fairlawn, touring the media center and several classrooms, including Escribano’s. But he missed the last building in the back, where the paint is peeling more, the stairs fell apart a few years ago and painted plywood serves as a wall.

Even with the shoddy facilities, Fairlawn is thriving, earning an A grade from the state for the last nine years. Its community classes for youngsters and adults, from knitting, violin, cheerleading and flamenco, are popular, keeping the classrooms busy after the bell rings.

Often it’s the push from parents and volunteers that prompts repairs.

Last school year, Hallandale High School got some attention after members of the Broward School District’s diversity committee inspected the 38-year-old facility, which was on the district’s list of priority projects. With photos, parents documented problems — a gaping hole in the ceiling of the boys’ locker room, metal lockers peeled open like sardine cans exposing sharp edges, and the eyewash in a biology classroom spewing water in different directions.

The committee’s 23-page report caused an uproar when it was released to the district in February 2011, prompting the district to address the most immediate concerns: patching up ceilings and repainting walls. But still no major dent in the promised renovations.

“If it’s dismal to see as an adult, then imagine how our students must feel,” said Catherine Kim Owens, a member of Hallandale Beach’s Education Advisory Board and former diversity committee co-chairwoman.

Each year the Broward School District’s diversity committee is charged with inspecting a sample of schools to ensure compliance. But with no money for repairs, community activists say the problems linger.

Broward Superintendent Robert Runcie maintains the district has tried to spread its dollars evenly, noting that most of the older schools on the list for replacement buildings have received at least a new wing, cafeteria or gym to alleviate some of the structural concerns.

For now, the Broward district gives priority to emergency repairs dealing with health and safety issues. But when money does become available, the district will reassess, giving more weight to projects that have been delayed before starting new ones, said Jeffrey S. Whitney, assistant director of the capital budget department.

“We’re not neglecting one set of schools in favor of another,” said Runcie. “ We’ve made significant investments in our schools, but there’s no denying that the capital is a very huge problem of significant concern. Once you get into this cycle of deferred maintenance, the longer projects are delayed, the higher it’s going to cost to fix that later. It’s a spiral you don’t want to get caught up in.”