A new report by the 21st Century School Fund, the International WELL Building Institute (IWBI), and the National Council on School Facilities (NCSF) reveals massive, chronic underinvestment in school facilities and grounds, while offering a roadmap for turning the tide toward safer, healthier, and more modern schools. While working with the available funding, designers for the education sector must create environments that offer students clean air and adaptable learning spaces.
As the funding gap is revealed, it is critical to understand the available options for upgrading existing school infrastructure, and metal can play an instrumental role in this process. Pre-engineered metal buildings (PEMBs) can support the need for increased capacities with fast and cost-effective additions to existing structures while reducing costs and construction time. Metal doors can ensure school buildings are secure and safe, while offering additional space with options like stacking.
The 2025 State of Our Schools report, released by the 21st Century School Fund, IWBI, and the NCSF, shows that the U.S. now faces a $90 billion annual shortfall in school facility funding, despite significant progress local school districts have made in ramping up their investments.
Since its earlier releases in 2016 and 2021, the report has tracked a steep and alarming rise in the nation’s school facilities funding deficit. What was a $46 billion gap in 2016 grew to $85 billion in 2021 and has continued to widen as school construction costs climb, building inventories expand, and aging facilities require more extensive maintenance, modernization, or replacement.
“As a former Surgeon General, I had the honor to serve as the ‘Nation’s Doctor,’ and what I find particularly concerning are the serious health implications from poor conditions of school buildings and grounds. As I’ve said before, our facilities are not just walls, roofs, and blacktop—they are health-critical environments,” says Dr. Richard Carmona, 17th Surgeon General of the United States. “It’s time to take decisive action to ensure our schools are adequately funded so they are healthy, sustainable, safe, and secure, becoming places where learning thrives and dreams take hold.”
“Students need clean air, sufficient caring and competent staff to meet their needs, and enough room to do more than sit in rows and stand in lines. Many districts are being stretched too thin to provide these foundational facility characteristics for all their students,” says David Sturtz, founder and CEO, Sturtz and Company. “We need at least as much thought, if not more, in how to adequately fund and design a school district’s facilities and operations as we do individual school buildings. If districts do not have sufficient budgets to keep all their buildings in good working condition and staff them sufficiently to meet their students’ needs, then focusing on the particulars of architectural design misses the mark.”
With this in mind, metal is a key component of designing healthy education spaces. Its role is essential in ensuring ventilation systems are used effectively to support students with safe, clean air. Additionally, designing adaptable spaces with room for movement can mean incorporating decorative elements into walls and ceilings with ornamental metals—using creative coatings, textures, or perforations—to provide visually stimulating learning environments without taking up too much floor space, giving students room to learn. Further, incorporating daylight control with sunshades and grilles can encourage the use of natural light in school environments.
According to Mary Filardo, executive director of 21st Century School Fund and lead author of the report, “Even as local districts have stepped up by increasing their annual spending on school facilities from $95 billion in 2016 to more than $150 billion now, they are still falling behind. As the funding gap for our critical school infrastructure grows, it becomes even harder to climb out of this hole unless we begin to better share the load across levels of government and embrace a dynamic solution set that ensures every public dollar delivers a stronger return on investment.”
In the United States, PK-12 school facilities represent the second largest sector of public infrastructure investment, surpassed only by highways. These buildings are where nearly 60 million students, teachers, and staff spend their days, making them among the most essential pieces of community infrastructure. Yet unlike transportation infrastructure, where federal and state governments shoulder most of the costs, school facilities are primarily left to local districts. The report finds that local districts bear 80 percent of school facility funding, with states contributing 17 percent and the federal government just three percent.
“With a $90 billion annual shortfall, the magnitude of this crisis is undeniable and utterly unacceptable. It’s simply impossible for local districts to continue to shoulder this burden disproportionately,” says Rachel Hodgdon, president and CEO at the IWBI. “Without greater responsibility across all levels of government, particularly the federal government, our country will continue to underfund the very infrastructure that determines the health, safety, and educational outcomes of millions of children. Where our children learn matters, and access to safe, healthy, and modern learning environments should be a right, not a privilege.”
The report also underscores how deeply uneven and unequal school facility investment remains across the country, with the most significant burdens falling on disadvantaged and rural districts. High-poverty districts had 30 percent less capital invested in their school buildings than low-poverty districts, and rural districts received less than half the per-student capital investment of their suburban and city counterparts. The findings point to persistent gaps that continue to leave rural and high-poverty communities bearing a disproportionate share of the burden and facing far greater challenges in achieving safe, healthy, and modern school facilities.
“For all of us who care about our communities, we know that our schools are their beating hearts. Closing these funding gaps should be a top priority for every one of us,” says Brandon Payne, executive director, NCSF. “This is a moment to unite to ensure our public schools meet modern standards for health, safety, learning, and educational adequacy.”
Further, according to the report, as school districts struggle to fill this widening gap, they are also sinking deeper into debt. By the end of fiscal year 2023, local districts carried more than half a trillion dollars in long-term debt and paid $22 billion in interest alone.
As stated in the report, the $90 billion annual investment gap reflects what is required for responsible stewardship and modern school facilities and grounds, covering both capital needs and operations and maintenance. Each year, the U.S. spends an average of $82 billion on capital improvements, leaving a $56 billion shortfall. Similarly, the total outlay for facility operations and maintenance is $70 billion, $34 billion less than needed. Together, these deficiencies in capital investment and ongoing maintenance constitute the total gap of $90 billion.
This year’s report does more than diagnose the scale and severity of the crisis; it also lays out a bold, actionable path to achieve modern schools by 2050. It calls for new approaches and more shared investment across all levels of government, alongside a stronger focus on building the capacity needed to deliver improvements. Central to its recommendations is securing a stable, reliable federal incentive funding program of $25 billion per year, which the report finds would reduce annual requirements by $75 billion—a 34 percent return on investment. The report also urges expanding federal support for state capacity grants for facility data, planning, technical assistance, and training to all states to ensure that states and districts are equipped for the modernization work ahead.
“Public schools are public infrastructure. And we should invest in them just as we invest in roads and bridges. With annual shortfalls growing despite increased state and local investment, it is clear that a federal partnership is needed,” says Senator Jack Reed (D-RI), the author of the Rebuild America’s Schools Act which would target new federal infrastructure investments to help local school districts address building and modernization needs. “Congress must come together to solve this crisis and deliver the federal investment our schools need to keep students healthy, safe, and equipped to meet the challenges of the future.”
“Modern, thoughtfully designed public schools are not luxuries—they are essential to student success,” says Pamela Loeffelman, senior principal at DLR Group, an integrated design firm specializing in future-focused learning environments for K–12 schools. “Well-designed, dynamic learning environments empower students, support well-being, and are foundational for them to thrive in a rapidly changing world. We need federal leadership and sustained funding to ensure that all students, in every community, benefit from the power of modern, high-performing school facilities.”
