School Buildings Get Poor Marks as Places to Inspire Learning : Education: Studies find broken faucets, cracked windows, peeling plaster as buildings age without funds to keep them serviceable. In Los Angeles, the earthquake has more than doubled the existing problem.

Teachers dole out water from thermos jugs in the crumbling classrooms of New York’s once-splendid Boys High in the Bedford-Stuyvesant district of Brooklyn. The drinking fountains spout rust.

Children go to some schools in rural Alabama where the windows break when it’s windy and phys-ed class means studying the rules of the game at your desk, not playing it. There are no gyms.

Around the country, students are trying to learn and teachers are trying to teach in schools without the basics. Children swelter or freeze, stand for lack of chairs in class, go to toilets without doors or paper, and walk down dingy hallways painted every few decades.

Worst hurt are children from inner cities and poor rural areas, where decay and danger are often companions to growing up. But even in better-off suburbs, schools both old and new are quietly fraying as needed repairs are not made.

“Millions of kids go into schools every day that are an overt insult to them,” said Gary Orfield, a professor of education and social policy at Harvard’s School of Education. “It gives kids the sense that they aren’t deserving of the lowest level of respect.”

Despite much hue and cry over educational reform, little has been said about sprucing up the country’s 84,580 school buildings--a bill some estimate would run as high as $100 billion.

No federal money is available for buildings, and stretched local and state funds usually go first to teacher paychecks or the costs of book-learning, not paint and plaster. The idea that schooling can take place within any room, be it leaky or dim, also holds sway.

To cope, a growing number of districts are turning to private firms. And the issue has figured prominently in court cases demanding equal education opportunities for the poor. But many say far too little is being done to avert a crisis.

“I’ve seen buildings of such lack of quality that a federal judge wouldn’t allow us to keep prisoners there,” said Rep. Dale Kildee (D-Mich.), a leading backer of federal help for school buildings.

“It’s a question of priorities,” said Kildee, chairman of the House subcommittee on elementary, secondary and vocational education.

From the days of the simple schoolhouse crammed with youngsters 5 to 15, school buildings have vastly changed.

With the need to provide space for special-needs classes and computers, schools now allot more than 100 square feet per child, compared with 70 in the 1970s, says Paul Abramson, editorial director of American School & University magazine.

Architects also are being asked to create more flexible schools that reflect local history and can be changed to fit different curricula, said Gaylaird Christopher, a leading school architect.

But, more and more often, communities cannot afford simply to build new schools when education needs change or classes grow. Increasingly, they must renovate.

In the last decade, only about 40% of construction dollars has been spent on new buildings, in contrast to 65% in the 1970s, said Abramson. And the trend will continue, he and others say.

“Probably the biggest issue in the next 10 years is making the existing facilities work with some of the more dynamic programs,” Christopher said. “A bigger issue than building schools is upkeep.”

*

If today’s school buildings are largely going to be the schoolhouses of tomorrow, how are they faring?

Ask 17-year-old Nicole Burts, a student at Brooklyn’s century-old Boys High who says she wonders whether “something is going to fall on my head as I walk around. . . . It makes me sad.”

As she speaks, a jagged piece of rusty tin ceiling hangs over a section of her world-history classroom.

“We’ve pulled on it. It won’t come down,” says Tony Embriano, the burly, friendly principal, trying to reassure students. He heads a citywide program for potential dropouts, some of whom--like Nicole--attend Boys High.

In private, however, he laments the condition of the school, where paint is peeling, toilet stalls lack doors and water fountains are dry. A quarrel between the school district and city officials stopped repairs for six years.

“What does this say to the kids?” asks Embriano. “You can be a kid in New York and go to school for 10 to 12 years and never see a decent classroom.”

Boys High is fortunate--a $29-million cleanup has just begun. But a plague of decay only worsens in New York, where children sometimes stand for lack of chairs in class and an estimated $26 billion in repairs are needed.

*

In schools around the country the picture is just as bleak.

A national poll of administrators last year found that 59% of 5,370 buildings surveyed were described as in poor to barely adequate condition.

The survey, carried out by AS&U;, found that nearly two out of three city schools were in such condition, more than one out of three rural schools and one in six suburban schools.

Old age is often the root problem, although relatively new schools are sometimes falling apart because they weren’t built to last. About three-quarters of rural and urban schools surveyed were more than 21 years old, compared with nearly 60% of those in the suburbs.

In Alabama’s Choctaw County, where most of the eight schools were built in the 1930s, the window sashes are so frail that the panes pop out in high winds or bad weather, said Supt. Toreatha Johnson.

The staff can usually spot a pane that’s about to break, but not always, said Johnson, whose staff also has to contend with sewage overflows within buildings, and a lack of gyms in four of the county’s six elementary schools.

“The problem is, you’re constantly repairing, putting the new into the old,” she said. “It’s a constant, vicious cycle. You’re never able to get ahead.”

In prosperous Connecticut, a recent survey by the state’s Education Assn. also lamented the age of schools. Fifty percent of the state’s schools lack smoke alarms or sprinklers in classrooms, it said, blaming less stringent fire codes used in older buildings.

After nationwide surveys, the Education Writers Assn. estimated in 1989 that $41 billion in repairs would be needed to bring U.S. schools up to par, while the American Assn. of School Administrators cited a $100-billion price tag in 1991.

Julie Crum, deputy director of maintenance and operations in Los Angeles, said there is a $605-million backlog in repairs for the city’s 650 schools.

“It is pretty apparent that this is an uphill battle that we are not winning,” she said.

She made her comments before the recent catastrophic 6.6 earthquake, which exacerbated the schools’ problems. Early estimates placed the temblor’s damage to school buildings at $700 million--almost $100 million more than the pre-quake backlog.

Communities usually draw maintenance and repair funds from the state and local funding that makes up the bulk of their budgets. Larger projects such as additions or new schools commonly come from bond offerings taken to voters.

But with parents of school-age children making up a shrinking proportion of voters, such bond offerings have more and more trouble being passed. And with school budgets so stretched, maintenance money is often used elsewhere.

“With the needs of students in Los Angeles, it is hard to cut the instruction program,” Crum said. “So where else do you look for money? Maintenance is one place where funds get cut.”

An official in New Jersey, where $6 billion in repairs and new construction is needed for the five years ending in 1995, called it the “classic guns and butter dilemma.”

Carl Letterie, director of New Jersey’s Bureau of State Facility Planning Services, said, “Your priority is to teach school, but how many years can you let the roof leak before the school can’t be used?”

Many educators say it’s time to make the issue a higher priority nationally--even at the expense of other education reforms.

“The point is that all the school reforms on earth are worthless if kids have to come to school in buildings that destroy their spirits,” said Jonathan Kozol, author of “Savage Inequalities: Children In America’s Schools,” a chilling look at the conditions in schools in poor, minority communities.

“Nine-tenths of school reform is like polishing the silver in the dining room when rats are swimming in the living room.”

Kozol and other social critics contend that the notion that the schoolroom is secondary to the schooling is used as an excuse for pushing the issue of crumbling buildings far down the education agenda.

Others argue that students can learn almost anywhere.

Principal Lorraine Skeen said her elementary school students in New York’s East Harlem neighborhood learned to cope. “It didn’t matter if the plaster was falling on their heads, they still studied,” she said.

Skeen’s pupils did indeed test well before a recent renovation. Later scores weren’t available.

To help resolve the dispute, the Council of Educational Facility Planners International--an association of architects, administrators and others--recently started what it says is the biggest study yet of the link between achievement and school buildings. The $100,000 project is due to be completed next year.

To get their schools fixed up, meanwhile, some educators are looking outside their communities for help.

Wilson Deakin Jr., assistant superintendent in Manchester, Conn., in explaining one reason why the city hired a private custodial firm, said: “We always seemed to be putting out fires, rather than taking preventive maintenance.”

Staff training, state-of-the-art equipment, computer data bases and--not least--saving money are other reasons districts are increasingly turning to private firms for upkeep and repairs.

Since hiring a private firm in 1991, the Kansas City, Mo., schools have whittled a repair backlog from 5,000 orders to 1,400, says Arthur Sykes, associate superintendent for maintenance and operations and security and engineering.

The courts may provide another source of hope for deteriorated school buildings, legal advocates say.

The issue of poor school buildings figures prominently in some of the dozens of court cases filed concerning inequalities in schooling for poor children.

In Alabama, a judge ruled last March that the state’s schools were underfunded and unequally funded, following harrowing testimony by Johnson and others on decrepit facilities. A remedy plan, which will increase school funding about 20% in the first year, is now before the Legislature.

Such court cases are a crucial means for poor, minority children to obtain an adequate education--in a building that is “safe and secure,” said Helen Hershkoff, associate legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union Foundation.

For the children in the country’s most ramshackle schools, however, long-term solutions may come too late. Children across the country may never know the joy of a good schoolroom.

Tiffany Hall, a high school junior in Butler, Ala., goes to a school with peeling paint, dirty bathrooms, 40 children to a class, and air conditioners that the students sold doughnuts to buy.

“They’re always talking about (how) ‘We’re the future of America,’ ” she said, “and they won’t even give us a decent place to learn.”