At each of the 11 town halls Pittsburgh Public Schools hosted this summer to help determine the district’s future, consultants hired for the task frequently returned to one metric: the Facilities Condition Index (FCI).
Though it’s not the only measure school officials are considering as they develop a Facilities Utilization Plan that will likely result in school closures, examining each school’s FCI illuminates a startling picture: the vast majority of Pittsburgh schools require moderate to major renovations in order to sustain them for future use.
Only seven of the district’s 59 facilities, meanwhile, are passable with only minor touch-ups, according to district records.
Building deterioration concerns come in addition to the ongoing enrollment dilemma the district has repeatedly cited in recent years. Student enrollment has dropped by close to 4,000 students since 2017, with many families opting for charter and private schools. Pittsburgh Public has been left with half-empty school buildings and growing costs.
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In an early Facilities Utilization Plan proposal introduced in April, district leaders recommended consolidating buildings and changing feeder patterns. Education Resource Strategies, the consultant firm hired by PPS to analyze the district’s current configuration, is expected to provide various scenarios in an education committee meeting on Aug. 13.
That will kickstart a second round of community engagement meetings, and from there consultants will issue their final recommendations to the school board in September. Public hearings on any changes — including likely school closures — would then begin.
While school board members initially planned to vote on those recommendations while finalizing the district’s budget in December, board president Gene Walker said last month it’s possible that the timeline could extend into the new year.
In the meantime, their consultants say that, given the general state of the district’s building stock, tough decisions will be inevitable.
“Most schools would require minor to major renovations at a significant financial cost,” said Angela King Smith, a partner at Education Resource Strategies. “And the district doesn't have the available resources needed in the short or the long term to cover all of those costs, because it is quite significant.”
What is the Facilities Condition Index?
The FCI is a standard system used in construction to assess a facility's condition. It compares the cost of maintaining and repairing the existing facility with the expense of building a new one — not unlike deciding whether to total a car. This method is used to evaluate each facility within the school district and compare it with other buildings regardless of their size and complexities.
A higher FCI rating indicates a higher need for major renovations or building replacements.
According to the most recent FCI data, which was calculated by the district in 2021, only five schools in PPS have an FCI rating below 16% — indicating they require only general maintenance. Most school buildings within the district require moderate renovations and have an FCI rating between 31% and 60%.
District leaders are also looking at how well buildings accommodate the learning needs of their students in the physical spaces. The Educational Adequacy Index (EAI) evaluates how well each school building is equipped to meet the requirements of the current instructional curriculum in terms of academic spaces for arts, science or music, and such spaces as gyms, auditoriums or cafeterias.
Nearly half of the buildings in the district have received an F grade on the EAI index, meaning that many resources in those buildings are deemed inadequate and the buildings lack the necessary spaces such as educational, administrative or supports. The grading requires comparing schools to what they call an “ideal school facility,” developed with input from Pittsburgh Public’s principals, program directors and staff.
Michael McNamara, chief operations officer at PPS, said the FCI index was initially calculated in 2009 to inform a 10-year plan for the district to determine the level of investment needed in each building.
To calculate a building’s FCI, district officials deployed a three-person team to each building, including McNamara, to measure various data points such as flooring, roofing and building exteriors, and compared those with the last 20 years of capital projects. The FCI team also took surveys from maintenance and custodial employees about different systems in each building.
The latest FCI index from 2021 reflects additional factors built outside of the standard FCI calculation such as air conditioning, food service and building configuration.
“We personalized it more for the district. So, we put a little weight onto air conditioning so that if that building didn't have air conditioning, the FCI data would show up not as good of a condition,” McNamara said.
However, district officials say the FCI and EAI measurements are not the most important factors considered in the district’s Facilities Utilization Plan.
Ebony Pugh, district spokesperson, emphasized the larger scope of the Facilities Utilization Plan.
“We're using the lens through facilities, but it's about ‘What do we want to provide for our students?’” she said. “And we know that there's inefficiencies in the way that we're currently structured.”
A tale of two schools
With an FCI rating of 7.1%, Pittsburgh’s West Liberty K-5 in Brookline, which enrolls 155 students, has the best rating among all schools, in part due to renovations and remodeling in 2019. Fulton K-5 in Highland Park, with a student enrollment of 276 and which hasn’t been renovated since 1929, has an FCI rating of 68.8% — the worst in the district.
The 2019 renovations at West Liberty, an 83-year-old school, brought its FCI rating down from 47.7% to 7% at a cost of $11.1 million. New additions in the building included a library, science, music and art classrooms and learning technology.
According to district data, it would take an estimated $21.9 million to upgrade and renovate Fulton, first built in 1893. Doing so would lower its FCI rating to 22.8%.
Community voices concerns about the data
The district has drawn criticism for using data some community members worry is outdated, inaccurate or will target the city’s predominantly Black neighborhoods. Majority-Black schools across the country are more than three times as likely as others to be closed, a recent Stanford study found.
One petition urged school board members to extend their timeline so that schools could verify the district’s facility data, calling their construction estimates “inaccurate and inflated.”
Meredith Knight, who authored the petition, formerly served as Fulton’s Parent-Teacher Organization president. She voiced concerns about data transparency at the district’s public hearing last month.
“We're seeing data presented to us that focuses solely on building age, facility condition and enrollment. Data that is imprecise at best and inaccurate or manipulated at worst,” Knight said. “And this is the only data being presented to us.”
Stephen Connell, the district’s director of facilities, noted that facilities staff presented a detailed overview of FCI data during school board meetings in 2020 and 2021. He said building age and utilization data is part of his department’s yearly reporting to the board, alongside its capital plan presentation.
“We weren’t keeping it a secret or anything like that,” McNamara, the chief operations officer, added.
But others have voiced concerns about the limited scope of the data provided to school board members.
Jason Striner, whose daughter attends Fulton, said truly accurate data would reflect the scope of work performed by contractors — including electricians, engineers, architects and HVAC consultants — for each building in the district.
Striner said he is deeply familiar with the type of facilities renovation data PPS is reviewing. He serves as the director of construction at Flynn Construction, a national contractor based in Pittsburgh.
He points to how the district estimated in 2021 that painting Fulton’s upper floors alone would cost $345,000.
“If you have a number, and you just say painting — what are we painting? Is it the walls?” Striner said. “Because in my line of work, you have to have a complete scope of work of everything that's included to come up with that number.”
Striner said that without a breakdown, school leaders aren’t working with adequate data as they make potentially dramatic changes to the district’s configuration.
“There has to be more,” he said. ”You can't just throw numbers out there.”
McNamara said that while the district was able to put together “a deeper dive into the data than any consultant would,” anything more than his team’s high-level estimate would have cost the district many thousands of dollars.
All of the work to determine each building’s FCI rating was completed internally, with McNamara, Connell and one other staff member touring buildings on Friday afternoons for a year and a half.
“When we're doing a big report over 60 different buildings, it's not really feasible to go into that kind of detail with every project that needs to be done at that building,” McNamara said.
Fighting for a beloved school
Even with a high FCI rating, families at Fulton have rallied around the school to keep it open. A 2021 reconfiguration proposal that was tabled suggested closing Fulton, citing poor building resources and limited potential for improvement.
Laura Mullen, the school’s PTO president, said that while Fulton may not have air conditioning or a full-service cafeteria, it remains a warm and welcoming place for its students and families.
Mullen described the school’s large windows, high ceilings and large classrooms. She also mentioned that, despite an F on the EAI scale, Fulton continues to provide instructional offerings many small schools do not, including music, art, library and French.
“I think that's a really important factor to highlight because the picture being painted doesn't capture that,” Mullen said.
Mullen said the school often feels full, despite relatively low enrollment. According to the district, Fulton enrolls just under 300 students and has the capacity to serve close to 500.
Mullen said many of her neighbors in Highland Park are choosing charter and private schools rather than the neighborhood public option.
Striner was one of those parents until he and his wife decided to send their youngest daughter to Fulton for the first time during the past school year.
Striner’s daughter, Sienna, has Down syndrome and tried several different options outside of the district before she “found her home” at Fulton.
“We didn't think we'd find anywhere for her, and it's just been awesome. The community is great, teachers are great — everything about it,” Striner said. “We just love it there and hope that she has that home to go to.”
Jillian Forstadt is the education reporter at 90.5 WESA. She can be reached at jforstadt@wesa.fm.
Lajja Mistry is the K-12 education reporter at PublicSource. She can be reached at lajja@publicsource.org.
This story was fact-checked by Jamie Wiggan.
The audio for this story was produced by Susan Scott Peterson.
90.5 WESA partnered with PublicSource on this report, an independent local news organization serving the Pittsburgh region. More at publicsource.org.
