Across the nation, parents and politicians are demanding better-educated youngsters. Virginia’s business community badly wants workers capable of handling jobs requiring higher levels of literacy and mathematics. Needed are more and better teachers, along with modern and spacious schools.

In school construction, Virginia falls short, despite a national boom in school building. While the state is building more schools — 28 last year compared with about 20 schools annually about a decade ago — current construction still doesn’t come close to meeting needs. If building were to keep pace with actual demand, the state needs to be building at least 36 schools each year, according to the latest data available. Virginia is already losing momentum. This year’s building plan, 26 schools, is falling short of last year’s.

Part of the problem is that localities don’t have the money. A 1996 Virginia Department of Education survey found that a vast majority of the state’s schools can’t afford upgrades and new facilities. Nor could they if localities doubled property taxes to generate revenue.

A critical problem when it comes to designing and building schools is that education today isn’t delivered the way it was 25 years ago. Yet, many districts are stuck with aging and increasingly obsolete buildings. Today’s school structures need to integrate personal computers and their local area networks while taking into account smaller classroom sizes. With more PCs, air conditioning is becoming mandatory. According to the state survey, 32 percent of schools statewide lack air conditioning. New school buildings also need to be designed so they can be expanded depending upon need.

All of this takes money, but the state has not stepped in to help. Virginia ranks among the lowest nationally in state support for school construction. Because costs are largely borne by localities, politics and government mandates can make the problem worse. "Every politician that ran last year said, ‘We’re going to lower student-teacher ratios,’" says Al Reasor, director of building services for Albemarle County Public Schools. "They gave [money for] more teachers, but nobody gave for more classrooms. That’s why we’re scampering." At the local level, high hopes for shiny new schools are butting heads with limited construction budgets and rising costs: Building materials and real estate prices have risen by 40 percent or more since the late 1990s.

In addition to calls for smaller class sizes, technology needs — for computers, telecommunications and electrical systems — make the problem worse. "Divisions estimate they’ll need $185 million to become technology ready, which is somewhere around $100,000 a school," says David Boddy, the Virginia Department of Education’s director of facilities services.

In the Old Dominion the problem isn’t necessarily driven by burgeoning school populations — what demographers call the baby boom echo. While there are more schoolchildren in the metropolitan crescent from Northern Virginia to Tidewater, most districts are looking at declining enrollment. So what’s the problem? Schools are old and, because of budget-crunching during the late ’80s and early ’90s and inflationary pressures that followed, many districts haven’t done much building. "We found that 63 percent of schools in Virginia either needed major renovation or replacement — all schools built before 1970," Boddy says. Architects and planners say most schools are built with a program life of 50 years and need a major renovation after 25 years.

Changing educational philosophies are adding to the pressure for space. An emphasis on special-education programs and mainstreaming has introduced a need for classrooms to accommodate a dozen students or less. "The education system has been criticized for not doing its job," says Jim McCala of the Richmond architectural firm Mosley, Harris and McClintock. "But [that] takes space, and additional programs, and then they have to have the money." Sometimes, that money has to go for improvements that people can’t see, and that can be a hard sell. Many schools, for example, want computers in classrooms. But 72 percent lack electrical outlets to hook them up and capacity to support the increased power demand, not to mention the space to put them. Add the required telecommunications infrastructure, and you’re talking serious money. "It’s an issue on just about every renovation or addition," McCala says. "There’s more that the school systems would like to do than there are funds available."

There’s another side to the technology costs, though. Expensive high-tech infrastructure can also be used to cut costs and expand educational offerings. In the Fredericksburg area, for example, students at three different schools take part in classes of the Commonwealth Governor’s School via live broadcasts. The city of Portsmouth recently opened the tech-heavy I.C. Norcom High School, a math, science and technology magnet school that is wired for distance-learning in every classroom.

Albemarle County is one of the luckier — and wealthier — divisions. It’s in a better position than most and has enjoyed community and government support for its ambitious capital projects. In the past 12 years it has built seven new schools and completed major additions and renovations to 15 others. All schools have been air-conditioned since 1990, and the district is in the last phase of putting telecommunications systems in every classroom.

Yet things are still tight. Eleven of the district’s 15 elementary schools are over capacity, as are three of five middle schools and one of three high schools. A key reason for the crowding is a change in the meaning of "capacity." Schools used to be built for 25 to 30 pupils per class. Today the county’s elementary classrooms average 17 to 21 students. "I have 300 elementary classrooms. If you lower the student-teacher ratio by one, you lose a capacity system-wide of 300 students," Reasor says. "When you lower that capacity by two, it’s 600 students, which equals an elementary school."

Like all Virginia localities, Albemarle funds most of its school costs through property taxes. So rising real estate values can mean more tax revenue for education, but that blessing can also be a curse. Albemarle has been blindsided by the price of land for its new schools. A new, 600-student northern elementary school was supposed to open in 2001. The project has been delayed a year because of a jump in land prices that accompanied commercial growth north of Charlottesville. Negotiations have been brutal. The school system had budgeted $30,000 an acre but prices can be $100,000 an acre.

Financial pressures are forcing districts statewide to stretch their dollars by changing school design. Goochland High School in central Virginia is a prime example. The $16 million school, which will open in the fall of 2001 as an 800-student high school, is designed to accommodate the addition of a 600-student middle school that the county will eventually need. As Goochland’s population grows, the building can grow. With an addition, the high school can expand to serve 1,000 students, and the middle school can expand to serve 800 students.

While larger schools reduce costs through economies of scale, many educators don’t want to lose the small-school feel. So architects have begun using the "house" concept, once referred to as subschools or pods. Goochland is one example. Another is Albemarle County’s $29 million Monticello High School. It was built with three houses, but a planned expansion five years down the road will allow a fourth. That will enable the school to break up the school by departments or by class — freshmen, sophomores, juniors and seniors.

The house concept, now common in new construction and major renovations, is also preferred to help allay security concerns. Administrators are spread throughout the facility. New designs eliminate enclosed stairwells, blind corridors and the number of outside entrances.

Besides keeping up with new demands, school systems have to take care of what they have. "Somewhere mixed into all this is the need to keep existing buildings up-to-date," McCala notes. "There have been delays [in maintenance] and probably always will when there’s an economic downturn."