EDUCATION

Arizona has inspected only 1 school for building deficiencies in 3 years

Lily Altavena
The Republic | azcentral.com
A playground in Ajo, Arizona, was shut down for more than a year because of sinkholes.

Inspectors with the Arizona School Facilities Board once identified critical problems at schools during inspections: High carbon dioxide levels in one school's classrooms. A 50-year-old air-conditioning system in another school. Fire alarm systems in need of repair.

But those inspections are almost extinct.

Since 2017, officials have conducted just one inspection of one school.

State law requires that the School Facilities Board inspect all district school buildings once every five years for building deficiencies and conduct preventive maintenance inspections at 20 randomly selected districts every 30 months. 

Arizona has 2,001 district school buildings, according to the Arizona Department of Education. Officials conducted 20 deficiencies inspections in 2015 and 18 in 2016. They did no inspections in 2017 and 2018 and one in 2019. 

Dave Cherry, a spokesman with the School Facilities Board, wrote in an email that the agency has instead directed its resources to fixing schools that have requested grant funding for facility repairs, requests that have increased by 280% during the past several years. 

He wrote that staffers are still in Arizona schools daily, investigating problems at school facilities in the grant process. 

The School Facilities Board doles out grants to pay for building repairs and for new schools. That grant money and the board's funding comes from the state Legislature. Nine voting members appointed by the governor sit on the board, which is also tasked with adopting adequacy guidelines for schools. 

State law requires inspections every 5 years

The Arizona Auditor General noted inconsistent inspections in a 2017 audit of the agency. School Facility Board officials agreed with the finding in the audit response and pledged to work with a third-party agency to help restart inspections. 

In two years, that's meant one inspection, conducted on the Stanfield School District in 2019. That inspection is nearly complete, Cherry said. 

Two types of inspections are required under state law. Deficiency inspections are meant to ensure school buildings are in adequate shape. Preventive maintenance inspections ensure schools are well maintained. 

SCHOOL REPAIRS:Hundreds in Arizona delayed for more than a year, audit finds

Cherry said the board is currently focused on fixing schools that apply for money through the Building Renewal Grant process.

In the process of issuing those grants, "we're at the districts every day and inspecting every problem that's reported to us," he said.

Cherry wrote that the number of projects at schools through the grant fund have increased to 1,200 during the current fiscal year, compared with 300 in 2015. The Legislature appropriated $76 million for building renewal in 2019, compared with $26.7 million in 2015, Cherry wrote.

Projects include fire alarm upgrades, replacements of leaking roofs and new carpeting.

Arizona isn't funding repairs, districts say

For years, school officials have sounded alarm bells over aging school infrastructure. When teachers walked out of their classrooms protesting low salaries and classroom funding in the spring of 2018, they posted stories of stained carpets and leaking ceilings.

The lack of inspections is a symptom of a larger problem in funding desperately needed school repairs, according to Danny Adelman, attorney with The Center for Law in the Public Interest.

Adelman is representing several school districts in a lawsuit against the state and School Facilities Board over what they claim is an unequal system for helping schools in disrepair. The lawsuit is still creeping through the legal process.

"The inspections part is just one piece in a much larger story about failing to adequately fund the capital needs of public schools," he said. "It's an important part, and it's a clear statutory mandate that they're not doing." 

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Adelman said school districts in wealthier areas can fix roofs and tripping hazards like uneven sidewalks or worn carpet with funds from local taxes. Schools in low-income areas cannot and are left to wade through the School Facilities Board's grant process. 

That system has led to grave facilities problems in Arizona schools, cutting into learning, the lawsuit claims.

Two schools in the Glendale Elementary School district, one of the lawsuit's plaintiffs, were temporarily shuttered in 2016 because the district found structural deficiencies in the school buildings. A structural engineer, in a letter to the district, wrote at the time that he couldn't say with certainty whether it was safe to occupy buildings at either school. 

At a school district in the tiny town of Ajo, a playground was shut down for more than a year because of sinkholes. The repairs took longer than they would have under the state's old building funding formula, Superintendent Robert Dooley said.

"We talk in our state about equal funding for all," he said. "That's a joke. It's not happening. It's not happening."

The lawsuit alleges that the state's school finance system doesn't allocate funding specifically for building repairs and other capital needs. While some school districts can ask voters to approve property taxes for those needs, less wealthy districts can't get bond approval. 

This isn't the first time Arizona's faced a legal battle over school finance. In response to litigation decades ago, the Legislature created the process Dooley recalled, a now-defunct building renewal formula to address facilities issues. 

But, the latest lawsuit alleges, state legislators soon abandoned that system, instead creating the Building Renewal Grant fund. The result is school districts shorted by millions of dollars, the lawsuit claims. 

"The amount of annual funding appropriated to the building renewal fund is trivial when compared to the overall capital needs of school districts in Arizona on a statewide basis," reads the lawsuit's complaint. 

The lawsuit is currently in a lengthy discovery stage. 

The state Legislature sent about $80 million in this upcoming budget year to the School Facilities Board to fund repairs for crumbling schools through the Building Renewal Grants.

The vast majority of the money, $63.5 million, is one-time funding meant to help schools repair problems in aging buildings.

According to the lawsuit, the old building renewal formula would have provided about $260 million annually to school districts for repairs and replacements.

A school playground with sinkholes 

Ajo, in southern Arizona, is a school district of about 440 students just north of Organ Pipe Cactus National Park and the whimsically named town of Why, Arizona.

Ajo's students all attend school on one campus. 

Dooley has been superintendent since 2002, spending nearly two decades watching school funding evolve and facilities suffer.

An old steel drain pipe passing through the campus and owned by a mining company created the sinkholes, Cherry wrote.

The holes were massive — "The biggest one you could have parked a Volkswagen in," Dooley said. 

Ajo applied for building renewal funding in August 2017, Cherry wrote, but several months of debate before that application took place over whether the School Facilities Board or the mining company should be responsible for the repairs. 

The board gave Ajo $23,000 for assessment in September 2017, $25,000 for design in March 2018 and $640,000 to actually fix the sinkholes in June 2018. 

Dooley said construction was completed around December 2018, although he had hoped it could be done by the beginning of the school year. 

School Facilities Board officials were helpful, he said, but he believes the Legislature should fund school repairs like it used to: directly. In the current system, he said, "We have to have a problem before we get help." 

"They want us to go through all these hoops, and it's time-consuming," Dooley said. "I've got a high school chemistry lab with no drain, and they want me to come up with bids ... I'm not a contractor." 

More than 100 facility repairs at Arizona schools took longer than a year to complete, potentially posing health and safety risks to students, according to a June 2019 audit of the state's School Facilities Board.

Reach the reporter at Lily.Altavena@ArizonaRepublic.com or follow her on Twitter @LilyAlta.

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