Spending on school construction increased for the sixth straight year in 1990, as more school districts replaced aging buildings or modified crowded ones.
The construction boom, documented in an annual building survey by American School and University magazine, totaled nearly $9.7 billion in 1990- the last year for which information was available-compared with $9.3 billion in 1989. Spending for new school construction was $4.1 billion in 1990, compared to $3.7 billion in 1989.
The magazine`s survey was the second in recent months to show that many school buildings are in need of improvement.
Last November, the American Association of School Administrators found that one in eight school buildings had deteriorated to the point that they provided a poor atmosphere for learning. Half of the country`s 110,000 school buildings were erected 30 to 40 years ago, the association survey said.
”The schools that were built in the 1950s and 1960s are not appropriate for today because of the increasing emphasis on technology,” said Joe Agron, the editor of American School and University.
But aging school buildings are only part of the construction picture. In some regions of the country, robust growth has produced more students and a need for more schools.
In addition, some school districts, particularly in the Northeast, have been harder hit by the recession than others, so that additions and modifications have had to substitute for construction of new buildings.
New construction was strongest in the Southeast, at nearly $1.5 billion, with about the same amount spent on additions and modifications. The West also reported robust growth in both new construction and additions.
But in the Northeast, construction of new schools totaled $385 million, one of the smallest totals of any region. The costs of adding on to schools there or modifying them totaled nearly $1.1 billion, however, as many districts chose those less expensive alternatives.
In some cases, school construction was the result of legislative mandates. In Nevada and Kentucky, for example, lawmakers limited the number of students who can be in a single classroom, thus requiring many districts to expand.
In other states, school districts that were compelled by legislatures to offer computer training had to modernize the wiring.
