State School Building Program Favors Wealthier Districts, Leaving Lower-Income Urban Students in Aging, Dilapidated Buildings, According to New Study
Building in urban spaces often comes with additional costs, leaving these districts – which have a high number of low-income and minority students – with outdated facilities.
AT ABORN ELEMENTARY SCHOOL in Lynn, a cramped room on the third floor serves as the school assembly space, art classroom, and library on any given day. Without a gym, students bundle up in their hats and coats during the winter for physical education class, which is held outdoors year-round. Outside, on a few occasions, bricks have fallen from the 130-year-old building. Built in 1897, it is Lynn’s oldest school, and one of 19 elementary schools in the district that are in similar shape.
Every day, nearly 240 students – more than half of whom come from low-income households, and nearly 40 percent of whom are English language learners – file into the small building.
“The majority of our elementary schools don't have art rooms, music rooms, gym spaces, or a cafetorium,” said Superintendent Evonne Alvarez, severely limiting the district’s ability to provide the kind of enrichment activities taken for granted in suburban schools.
It’s hardly a problem unique to Lynn, the state’s fourth largest school district, with 16,000 students.
The overcrowded and antiquated building conditions in the low-income, majority Latino school district are a testament to an inequitable state reimbursement process that disadvantages urban districts when it comes to school building projects, according to a new report by the MassINC Policy Center and the Worcester Regional Research Bureau. (The policy center is based at MassINC, the nonprofit civic organization that also publishes CommonWealth Beacon.)
Boston and the Gateway Cities have been significantly underrepresented in the Massachusetts School Building Authority’s Core Program, which distributes large grants to help communities build new schools or fully replace or renovate existing buildings.
Together they make up nearly a third of all schools in Massachusetts, yet they have received less than 19 percent of invitations to the Core Program since 2015, the report says. Suburban projects accounted for 57 percent of Core Program invites, despite accounting for just 43 percent of schools in the state.
As a result, the report says, despite efforts by the Legislature aimed at adequately funding school building projects, “students in Boston and the Gateway Cities continue to learn in buildings that are deteriorating, lacking in basic features, and often cramped and overcrowded.”
School construction projects are funded with a combination of state and local dollars through the MSBA, an independent state agency. It was formed two decades ago and charged with implementing a progressive funding formula in which state funds would cover up to 80 percent of construction costs for the lowest-income communities.
But it often hasn’t worked out that way, according to the report.
Not only have wealthier districts accounted for a disproportionate share of school building projects approved over the last decade, when projects in lower-income urban districts have been authorized, the state often ends up paying far less than the 80 percent share of costs laid out in the funding formula.
The report says a big reason for that is the school building authority’s cost-control policies, which were intended to create a more accountable system for financing school projects, don’t account for many of the construction challenges unique to dense urban settings. As a result, the reimbursement formula has become “regressive rather than progressive,” according to the new report.
The MSBA did not respond to a request for comment on the study.
Eligible project expenses in Boston and the state’s Gateway Cities are reimbursed by the MSBA at roughly 60 percent – a rate that is, on average, nearly 20 percentage points lower than the 80-percent reimbursement rate outlined in state law. That difference can represent tens of millions of dollars amid heightened construction costs, often making extensive renovations and new school construction a pipe dream in cities lacking the economic base to pay for it.
A Boston Globe investigation two years ago called attention to the stark racial disparities associated with the school construction aid process, but the Legislature has yet to act.
“We've known that these ground rules take all the progressivity out of the statute, so there certainly could and should be legislative oversight,” said Ben Forman, research director at the MassINC Policy Center.
State Sen. Jason Lewis, co-chair of the Joint Committee on Education, has introduced legislation that would establish an oversight commission to review the MSBA’s funding formulas. The Senate has passed versions of the bill several times, most recently last summer, but it has yet to be taken up by the House.
House Speaker Ron Mariano’s office did not respond to questions about where the bill stands in his chamber. Rep. Ken Gordon, co-chair of the Education Committee, declined to comment.
The state formula sets reimbursement rates for communities based on their ability to pay. While all districts in the state received less than the statutory reimbursement rate for projects approved between 2008 and 2015, the average reduction in Boston and the Gateway Cities was 34 and 19 percent compared to a reduction of 12 percent in suburban districts.
That disparity, the report says, is largely due to the fact that MSBA’s cost-control efforts fall more heavily on urban districts.
Urban districts struggle with the MSBA’s cap on how much it will reimburse per gross square foot. Construction is more expensive in congested urban communities, and having to build vertically requires more steel, elevators, and other expenses – all factors that end up leaving urban districts on the hook for more of the cost of school projects.
Lynn needs to build at least two large elementary schools to consolidate students from their existing, dated facilities, Alvarez said. The MSBA grants percentage-point increases to the statutory reimbursement rate for newly formed regional school districts to incentivize these kinds of projects, but urban districts that want to close and consolidate schools have little financial incentive to do so.
Meanwhile, demolition costs are only reimbursed by the MSBA when replacing a school on its existing site, and many cities must consolidate schools on other land that is large enough for a bigger facility and has adequate outdoor space for more students.
Since 2015, schools with the best building condition ratings have received nearly two-thirds of the MSBA’s Core Program invitations to help underwrite major renovations or replacement.
The MSBA approved Core Program awards for an average of 17 projects each year between 2008 and 2024. There are 276 high-need schools in Massachusetts that have well below-average facility condition ratings or operate significantly over capacity, and 60 percent of these are in Boston or the Gateway Cities. With the current funding model and pace of 17 projects a year, the report says it would take nearly 50 years to rebuild those schools, during which time other buildings in those districts would likely deteriorate.
Schools with low learning environment and building condition ratings – those missing essential learning features, such as auditoriums, gyms, and libraries, and those with overcrowding – were two and five times more likely to be in Boston and the Gateway Cities than elsewhere in the state, according to the report. Black, Hispanic, and low-income students are more likely to attend overcrowded schools, buildings lacking essential learning spaces, and facilities with other deficiencies.
In Lynn, nearly 60 percent of the district’s 26 schools are missing three or more essential learning features, such as gyms and libraries, nearly 20 percent have low building condition ratings, and 15 percent are over capacity, according to the report. Despite the city’s efforts, the district has only received one Core Program invitation since 2015.
That award will help fund a new Pickering Middle School, which is currently 109 years old. Construction is expected to be completed in just over a year, and the new facility will double capacity to alleviate overcrowding.
“The need is so much greater than this one school, and without serious reform, we don't have a path to be able to get to all the other schools that we need to,” said Mayor Jared Nicholson.
At Pickering – a facility of about 540 students – violin lessons are taught in the cafeteria. There is no space for band and instrument classes, because their auditorium had to be converted into additional classroom space to alleviate overcrowding.
Lynn is home to nearly a dozen schools that are over 100 years old. In contrast to other Massachusetts districts where enrollment has been flat or even declined, its student population has increased by more than 20 percent since 2010.
“Where are we going to physically put students?” asked Alvarez, the district superintendent.
The city applied to the Core Program for the Pickering School project in 2018 but was initially rejected. In 2023, local leaders called attention to the MSBA’s 42 percent reimbursement rate for the newly planned project, which resulted in a change that increased the rate to just over 60 percent.
“It’s still not 80 percent, but it was a $30 million swing, and it was the difference between being able to do this project and not,” Nicholson said. “All of our debt service capacity is going to be going to this middle school for the foreseeable future.”
Nicholson pointed to the state’s progressive funding formula for school operating costs, an approach that was further bolstered by the Student Opportunity Act in 2019, which increased aid for districts educating a high number of low-income students, English learners, and students of color. “That same thinking is needed on the capital side, on the long-term investment in the education of the students,” he said of the school building program.
The MassINC report recommends several steps the state can take, including increasing MSBA funding and prioritizing buildings in the worst shape, and rethinking reimbursement policies governing land acquisition and site preparation, which currently disadvantage urban districts.
Despite the district’s building conditions, Nicholson said teachers in Lynn work miracles with what little they have. Aborn Elementary School was one of the highest performing schools in the district on the 2025 MCAS exams, and students performed better than the statewide average in all three testing areas – English language arts, math, and science.
Forman, the MassINC research director, said school building conditions are clearly a factor in statewide MCAS exam scores that consistently show large gaps in achievement between white students and students of color.
“How about thinking about the dramatic difference between the buildings that those kids are learning in?” Forman said. “It makes a huge difference when a kid goes to a school where they don't have a cafeteria, and their classroom is in the basement with no light, and they don't have a chance to go to a music room, or an art room, or a gym.”
Cities like Lynn more often rely on the MSBA’s Accelerated Repair Program, which provides more modest grants for maintenance projects, because they cannot afford complete renovations or new construction and receive limited Core Program invites. Although it is one of the few resources they have, Alvarez argued that further investments in buildings that are clearly outdated is a Band-Aid solution, and an inefficient one at best.
“That’s literally what we've done over the years to try to mitigate the real problem. But at some point, it's just not sustainable,” she said. “There's only so many times you can fix things or repaint things.”
MSBA reimbursements do not cover land acquisition costs or site remediation expenses, which is also challenging for cities. Larger parcels of land that are municipally owned are rare and often unavailable. In a former industrial city like Lynn, the cost of abating and removing hazardous materials could also kill a project. Those costs are often unpredictable and can soar after a project begins, meaning the risk falls on the municipality, Nicholson said.
“The communities that can afford to take that on do, but the communities that don't have that ability can't, and then get further and further behind,” he said. “That's the position we find ourselves in.”
Without changes to the state funding formula, Nicholson says Lynn will continue “hitting a wall.”
This article first appeared on CommonWealth Beacon and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
