Strategies for prioritizing operational expense at K-12 educational facilities

Annually the United States allocates approximately ten percent of the primary and secondary educational budget, or roughly $50B U.S. Dollars, to the maintenance and operations of the nations educational infrastructure. Prior academic research initiatives suggest the physical qualities of the built environment can directly impact the performance of students learning within that space. Furthermore, strategic improvements to the educational infrastructure may also have a positive influence on contributing factors that enable student achievement, including teacher effectiveness, performance, and retention. The impact of providing well maintained educational facilities has been shown to improve student standardized test scores by anywhere from five to seventeen percentage points. While the built environment can have an effect on the students' performance, many schools in the US are currently facing financial constraints prohibiting the maintenance and necessary upgrades to their academic infrastructure. Currently, there is not a thorough understanding of the managerial philosophy and subsequent method of prioritizing spending in support of plant maintenance and operations at K-12 educational facilities. This research utilizes a mixed-method approach of qualitative structured interviews in combination with quantifiable data on annual spending and student academic performance targeting a representative sample of academic school districts in the state of Arizona. The outcome of the research will document existing asset management strategies. More specifically the research explores the extent to which current asset management strategies consider student scholastic achievement when prioritizing spending. The findings from this work will help to guide future research to develop a structured decision support tool, enabling K-12 administrators the ability to more effectively prioritize spending and thus permit the greatest benefit to student learning.