Whether you’re constructing a brand-new education building or renovating your local municipal office, one of the most important decisions to make is choosing the right project delivery method. While traditional methods separate design and construction into two distinct phases utilizing two different firms, the design-build approach brings everything together under one roof.

What Is Design-Build?

Design-build is a project delivery model used in construction in which a single organization is contracted for both the design and build phases. As opposed to a traditional construction project, where the project owner works with different firms — and their associated subcontractors — for each phase, in a design-build project, the owner has a single point-of-contact with a design-build firm.

Benefits of Design-Build Project Delivery

Design-build has several advantages. Typically, design-build projects are completed faster, for less money, and with higher quality than traditional projects — in part, because the delivery model empowers the contractor to make decisions while reducing the risk of last-minute technical complications. Perhaps most importantly, design-build is often seen as more conducive to innovation, as it enables internal teams to collaborate and share resources freely. The top five benefits of design-build include:

1. Single Point of Contact

With design-build construction projects, the design-build partner acts as the single point-of-contact for both design and construction, allowing for a seamless transition between those phases. They also are the single-point-of contact in managing (suggesting because this sentence is a bit redundant to first) subcontractors who are responsible for sharing ongoing updates with the customer. This means, if problems arise, everyone knows who to call as they’re already familiar with all aspects of the project and fully understand your vision and goals.

2. Faster Project Delivery

Because design and construction phases can overlap, design-build projects tend to move faster. By working with a design-build firm, they’re able to collaborate with the architects and construction team to streamline workflows, helping to prevent any delays to the project schedule.

3. Cost Savings and Predictability

A design-build team works together with you from day one to align the design, construction materials, and labor with your budget. As they’re also construction experts, they can also provide real-time cost estimates during the design phase, allowing for fewer change orders and unexpected costs so you stay within your original budget.

4. Higher Quality Assurance

As a design-build team is aligned from start to finish, they’re able to focus on and ensure innovation, functionality, and long-term facility performance throughout every phase of the project. With a thorough understanding of your goals, they work to ensure quality is upheld from groundbreaking to project completion and turnover.

5. Reduced Risk for You

With a single entity responsible for design and construction, you – the owner – are less exposed to legal and financial risks that can arise from coordination issues if you choose to partner with separate design and construction firms. The design-build partner assumes much of that risk, offering you peace of mind.

6. Improved Energy Efficiency

Partnering with a design-build team allows architects, engineers, and contractors to collaborate from the start, helping ensure that energy efficiency is built into the project goals and solutions early on. The team can conduct energy assessments earlier to identify opportunities to maximize performance and incorporate energy-saving solutions into the design.

Your Trusted Design-Build Expert

SitelogIQ’s design-build services encompass preconstruction assessments, architectural design, construction, and post-construction services. By keeping many of these processes in-house — and outsourcing to reputable partners when necessary — we can realize your vision in a cost-effective, efficient, and timely manner.

Design-build requires considerable resources and wide-ranging expertise. The training and experience of our team is a large part of what makes SitelogIQ an ideal partner for any project. Our staff work in a truly collaborative environment, which helps us drive innovation and, ultimately, design smarter and more functional buildings.

Contact us today to learn more about our design-build services and begin planning your next facility improvement or energy efficiency project.

The American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) estimates that deferred maintenance in U.S. K-12 public schools totals around $500 billion. This backlog includes essential repairs and updates to school buildings and facilities.

The facility funding gap refers to the difference between financial resources available to public schools for maintaining, repairing, and upgrading their buildings, and the actual amount needed to ensure they’re safe, conducive to learning, and meet community needs. The school facility funding gap highlights the shortfall in funding that many K-12 districts experience, and it is negatively impacting the quality of education provided and overall well-being of students and staff.

The educational standard for school district facility spend is $195 billion per year, however, districts only spend around $110 billion – leaving a $85 billion gap to make critical facility improvements.

Best practice for facility maintenance spending suggests districts should budget between 2% – 4% of the facility’s current replacement value:

2% if the district is keeping up with asset replacement and modernization
4% if the district is behind and has a high level of deferred maintenance

The rise of the nation’s K-12 facility funding gap has been brought on by increased school construction costs, increased building inventory, and a sharp decline in facility expenditures after the Great Recession. Collectively, we have our work cut out for us.

Impact on Student Performance

According to a new report from Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health’s Healthy Buildings Program:

A study of 75,000 high school students in New York City found that students were 12.3% more likely to fail an exam on a 90°F day versus a 75°F day.
Poor ventilation in schools was associated with student fatigue, lower attention span, and loss of concentration.
In a study of 500 8–9-year-olds, test scores were 5.5 points lower for each decibel increase in classroom noise.

Students focus better when they’re comfortable, are more likely to attend classes, and may be less likely to become ill. These qualities all come from classrooms that have proper ventilation, are well-lit, and maintain efficient cleaning schedules. Students who aren’t distracted or uncomfortable due to environmental factors are students who can remain attentive and better retain information.

By not addressing deferred maintenance – including outdated and inefficient HVAC, lighting, and other building systems – your students’ health, safety, and performance can suffer. It’s critical for districts to properly plan to tackle deferred maintenance, moving from a reactive to a proactive approach to facility maintenance.

How to Catch Up and Keep Up

From deteriorating buildings, outdated infrastructure, and severely stretched resources – neglecting to establish a capital plan for your organization’s facilities can negatively impact the health and safety of occupants.

Enter master facility planning, also often referred to as a capital plan, as a strategic approach to optimizing asset management. This comprehensive method of facility planning and maintenance helps to uncover critical needs, identify inefficiencies, and prioritize maintenance improvements. School facilities in good condition can help reduce absenteeism, improve test scores, improve teacher retention rates, and increase district retention and attraction of students and families.

A master facility plan should include your school’s vision and facility goals; a recent facility condition assessment with benchmarks; design and development for facility improvements; and a detailed plan for how you will implement and fund those improvements.

Struggling with getting started? See our expert recommendations in Smarter Facility Capital Planning, the top 4 things to include in your master facility plan.

With your master facility plan created and implemented, you can begin to catch up on your deferred maintenance, focusing on the most critical projects. The plan should be updated annually, helping you keep up with your facility maintenance and create a warm, safe, and dry environment for students and staff. By catching up and keeping up with your facility needs and maintenance, school districts can build trust, transparency, and teamwork with their staff, students, board, and community.

Bringing Funding to the Fight

As a space for both education and personal growth, your school’s learning environment may require upgrades. However, with tight budgets, funding for these types of infrastructure projects has often been limited. There are various funding strategies and options to help school districts bring funding to the fight as deferred maintenance is tackled.

Guaranteed Energy Savings Agreement (GESA): A GESA is a vehicle to decrease growing utility costs with a progressive contracting process that enables mass upgrades of building components such as lighting, HVAC, and water, among others to be replaced through a budget-neutral process. These upgrades play an important role in significantly reducing energy usage, which results in decreased utility spending to operate the project.
Energy as a Service (EaaS): EaaS payments are based on a measured quantity of energy (kilowatt-hours of electricity) saved. This enables you to treat energy efficiency as a resource to fund facility improvements and eliminate costly maintenance associated with outdated equipment. An EaaS agreement typically covers project costs and ongoing performance risk including full-service maintenance and monitoring.
Utility Rebates and Incentives: At SitelogIQ, our team is continually searching for and monitoring available utility rebates and incentives to help offset energy project costs for our customers. Understanding the nuances of how the incentive programs operate and requirements to ensure our projects qualify for the maximum incentives is part of the value offered by our team.
State and Federal Grants: SitelogIQ prides itself on helping our customers find and manage alternative ways to fund projects. We have experience writing grants and advocating for their award. Our team assists with identifying funding strategies, grant writing, application and documentation verification, and post-award administration to ensure compliance, support progress reporting, and assist with appropriate grant close-out documentation.

SitelogIQ’s team of project financing experts can guide you on all available financing options for your specific project type and work with your team throughout your project’s development to secure the necessary funds to get started.

Through a partnership with SitelogIQ, we will collaborate to identify, prioritize, and address your organization’s specific building needs and form and execute a thorough long-term strategy with our proven capacity to deliver a return on your investment. This strategic guidance can help you upgrade existing facilities to create and maintain resilient and future-ready spaces to meet occupant needs.

mySiteIQ, our technology-enabled platform, can also help you easily organize your facility assets and data, prioritize short- and long-term projects by constructing and comparing scenarios, and optimize your facility’s performance to ensure efficient projects.

Contact us today to develop a plan to tackle deferred maintenance with funding opportunities, creating a safer, healthier, and more sustainable space for your occupants and community.

U.S. school district infrastructure received a D+ by the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE), rating them in poor condition. The ASCE also reports that half of public schools have not undergone major improvements since their original construction, with the average school age being 49 years. Poor facility conditions in schools result in costly emergency repairs, unexpected closures, loss of learning hours, and community frustration.  

And the condition of our school infrastructure has only declined as there continues to be a gap between funds that are used versus funds needed for facility improvement. The funding gap has increased from 85B in 2021 to a projected 400B+ by 2033. Every school district In the United States is facing fund availability pressures.

As a school board member, your role extends to ensuring effective oversight and governance of how funds are being spent to maintain warm, safe, and dry learning environments for your students. With school board members nationwide managing a staggering $600 billion in funds impacting over 50 million students, the task is enormous but critical for ensuring that our educational facilities serve the current and future needs of our communities.

But being a board member can be overwhelming when you’re being asked to understand the priority and impact of a highly technical facility improvement project. Nor does it give you the technical expertise to explain to your community why that generator repair is more important than the new scoreboard they want for their sports stadium.

So how do you, as a school board member, make sure that you are building trust with your community and that you’re being a good steward of the communities’ tax dollars without this technical expertise? Here are some questions to ask your facility team to guide effective governance conversations with your district administration.  

1. What grade do your facilities receive?

We measure student performance by grade to understand where they excel and where they might need some extra assistance, and the same holds true for school facilities. We need to measure the facilities our students are using and ensure they receive an adequate grade to support student performance and meet ever-evolving needs.

The first step is to understand the state of the facilities the districts own or utilizes – where are these facilities, who are they serving, and what’s the condition of these buildings? Where are the biggest risks of asset failure across the district that could cause a school not to open. Regular facility assessments should be used as a tool to gather data about the current needs of the district.

Like with students, you should understand the high level ‘grade’ of your facilities to Identify where the greatest areas of need are:

What is the current condition of our major assets across the district?
What are the CO2 levels in our academic buildings?
Is there equity in the ‘grade’ or functionality of our facilities across the district?

Being transparent with this data allows your district to create alignment on what the priorities of the district should be to address risks. 

2. Why Is our plan, our plan?

Understanding the physical and functional condition of facilities enables your district to understand what work should be prioritized to maintain and improve them. A K-12 master facility plan should encompass the upgrade and modernization of major assets with a timeline that allows for budget planning and minimal learning disruption. This helps your district avoid unexpected emergency repairs that can strain finances, cause school closures, and create a lack of trust with the community.

By looking at data about the plan, we can start to understand where the funds are going, when they are being allocated, and why are they are being allocated the way they are, answering these questions:

Does this plan account for managing capacity towards enrollment trends?

How does this plan ensure we’re leaving a financially responsible legacy?
Does the plan meet the 4 must haves of strategic master facility  planning?
Does the plan have the level of community visibility and transparency that the board is expecting?

3. Does our plan’s spending align with the priorities of the district and the community we serve?

As a school board member, one of your core responsibilities is to set the priorities and goals of the district. This strategic role is not only about identifying what is most important for the students, staff, and community but also ensuring that every decision aligns with these established priorities.

It’s essential to regularly ask, “does our plan’s spending align with the priorities of the district?” This question serves as a vital checkpoint that keeps the board’s focus aligned with the district’s long-term objectives and educational mission.

Assessing how funds are allocated in relation to district priorities ensures a transparent use of the available funds. It helps maintain accountability across all levels of district management with the community by asking:

How are our facilities tied to our district’s strategic goals?
How are our upcoming projects enabling us to reach these goals?
What are our long- and short-term priorities for facility upgrades and modernizations? And why are these the priorities? (AKA, where is our money going and why is it being allocated that way?)

Asking these questions allows your district to stay proactive rather than reactive, which is key to managing your district’s facilities effectively and helping the district ensure no lost learning hours due to its facilities. It’s about making sure you’re not just spending money, but spending it wisely and fairly, so that you’re setting up the next generation of board members, and ultimately our students, for success.

Arming your administrators with the answers

Having answers to these questions might not come overnight. Depending on your district and how strategic you have been with facility planning, you might be in different stages of being able to answer these questions. By using a software tool such as mySiteIQ, you can use data and easily understood graphics to work together as a team to ask and answer these questions. This allows you to make better data-driven decisions, align on district facility improvements priorities, and ensure your master facility plan and budget addresses those needs.

In May 2022, the Department of Energy issued a ruling requiring lighting products to meet new standards. This largely eliminates most fluorescent, incandescent, and halogen products as they are seen as toxic and inefficient and unable to meet these new standards.

Since the ruling, 14 states and the District of Columbia have approved or proposed even stricter standards on lighting products, effectively banning the sale of fluorescent lighting within state lines, specifically general service lamps (GSLs), compact fluorescent lamps (CFLs), and linear fluorescent tubes (T8, T5, T12).

For schools, office buildings, hospitals, warehouses, and all buildings that have used these bulbs to date, this will require a lighting retrofit to stay within compliance of these bans. Here’s a look at the current state restriction timelines for all GSLs, CFLs, and linear fluorescent lights:

The Reason Behind the Ban

Once the most common lighting sources in offices, schools, warehouses, industrial facilities, and most buildings, fluorescent lights contain mercury, a toxic heavy metal that is used to help emit light more efficiently. Mercury is considered by the World Health Organization (WHO) one of the top 10 chemicals of major public health concern. While the average CFL containing ~4 milligrams of mercury might seem low, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) has emphasized there is no known safe level of mercury exposure. When intact, fluorescent lamps impart no health risk to their surroundings; however, if the bulbs break or are improperly disposed, the mercury can be released. This can pose risks to human health and pollute our landfills and water systems, creating long-term consequences to the environment.

In addition to the toxins, GSLs, CFLs, and linear fluorescent lighting consume more energy and have a short lifespan, compared to modern lighting technology. For example, LED lights are more energy efficient and sustainable, helping improve efficiency and reduce carbon emissions.

Moving away from fluorescent lighting will help to protect the health and safety of both people and the planet.

The Solution: LED Lighting

LED lighting is quickly becoming the standard for many industries due to its ability to create safe and environmentally-friendly spaces. With the ban of GSLs, CFLs, and linear fluorescent lights, LED lighting is a great alternative for retrofitting your lighting and provides many benefits.

LEDs are long-lasting, efficient, and compatible with solar panels, helping lower the carbon footprint. Long-term LED use offers a positive return on investment because they require up to 80% less energy than traditional incandescent bulbs and 20-30% less than CFLs. By consuming less energy, LEDs also contribute to a reduction in carbon emissions and help lower energy costs up to 80%, saving you thousands of dollars annually.

They are also more durable and have long lifespans, lasting up to 50,000 hours, depending on their quality and usage, while CFLs typically last around 8,000 hours. Because of this, LEDs don’t degrade as quickly as other bulbs, meaning you won’t have to stop operations to repair the lighting system as often.

In addition, LEDs offer bright, high-quality light to increase visibility inside workspaces, hallways, stairways, and outdoor environments, making these areas safer and enhancing occupant comfort. LED lighting upgrades help organizations keep pace with sustainability best practices and future-proof their facilities.

Check out our blog post to learn more about the advantages of LED lighting.

Your LED Retrofit Partner

As more states implement fluorescent light bans, your facility may require an LED lighting retrofit to maintain industry standards and remain in compliance. LED lighting can also help to enhance building aesthetics, improve facility performance, or reduce energy consumption.

At SitelogIQ, our nationwide team has a deep background of sustainability experience partnering with firms to improve facility performance and quality standards. To date, we completed over 2,000 lighting retrofit projects for multifamily complexes, K-12 school districts, higher education institutions, commercial properties, hotels, hospitals, and more. Our process begins with an energy audit to pinpoint high-need opportunities and determine a tailored, energy-efficient lighting solution. In addition, our energy and facility experts can identify the proper financing solutions or recommend grant opportunities to help you address budget limitations. 

Contact us today to begin planning your LED lighting retrofit!

According to a Pennsylvania School Boards Association (PSBA) State of Education report, 71.4% of survey respondents indicated that one or more of their buildings need major repair or replacement. In the PSBA report, the survey respondents listed HVAC, Building Envelope, and Energy Efficiency upgrades as their top areas of need.

However, the process for implementing those critical infrastructure investments has often hit a roadblock when it comes to securing the necessary funding. For Pennsylvania school districts, the introduction of a recent grant program may change that.

Here’s What You Need to Know

On Wednesday, December 13, Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro signed Act 34 of 2023 into law creating the Public School Facility Improvement Grant Program that provides funding for critical building infrastructure upgrades for K-12 school districts and career and technical education (CTE) centers.

Through the PA Department of Community & Economic Development (DCED) and Commonwealth Financing Authority (CFA), this program provides grants for:

Roof repairs and roof replacement;
Heating, ventilation, and air conditioning equipment;
Boilers and controls;
Plumbing systems;
Energy saving projects;
Health and safety upgrades, including lead and asbestos abatement /remediation and the purchase and maintenance of automated external defibrillators (AEDs);
Emergencies;
Accessibility projects;
Internet connectivity, not including the purchasing of educational technology hardware or software;
Demolition project;
Window repairs and window replacement; and,
Other projects approved by CFA

Grant program awards will require a 25% local match and range from $500,000 to $5,000,000 in project costs. There is no limit to the number of applications a school district can submit, however, no one school entity may receive more than 20% of the overall allocation.

With the creation of this grant program, the state is incentivizing long-term facility maintenance rather than major facility renovation or new construction. This approach provides sustainable and incremental investments into school facility’s aging infrastructure, which aligns to SitelogIQ’s approach to tackling deferred maintenance issues.

Recognizing the deficiencies of PlanCon, the state placed a moratorium on new applications in perpetuity, thus ending the PlanCon Program. Instead, the Public School Facility Improvement Grant Program application process is more streamlined and efficient process as it no longer requires school districts to complete a feasibility study to qualify and negates the cumbersome PlanCon application forms.

How These Project Impact Your Students & District

Research shows that students in classrooms with higher outdoor air ventilation rates scored 14 to 15 percent higher on standardized test scores than children in classrooms with lower outdoor ventilation. As we discuss in our How K-12 Facilities Impact Student Learning and Health blog, everything from temperature, humidity and lighting to indoor air quality, the state of your school facilities impacts student performance, absenteeism, and learning experience.

This grant program provides an opportunity for school districts to apply for funding that will address these areas, along with deferred maintenance issues we often witness in K-12 schools.

These investments will help K-12 district prioritize long-term facility maintenance, protecting the health and safety of their students and staff while also creating a comfortable and flexible environment for exceptional learning for decades to come.

We’re Here to Help

At SitelogIQ, we believe this grant program directly addresses the most pressing physical needs of our Pennsylvania public schools, and we were honored to have testified before the Senate Education Committee earlier this year to discuss the importance of this type of program.

As a facility solutions expert with experience in grant writing and advocacy, we’re here to help you complete the application process to secure this important funding and to partner with you to plan and execute upgrades to your facilities. In addition, our technology-enabled platform – mySiteIQ – can help K-12 districts like yours organize all of your facility assets, prioritize projects, and optimize project and energy performance.

If you’re interested in learning more about the Pennsylvania Public School Facility Improvement Grant Program and opportunities to make your school buildings better, contact us today.

While fall time marks the beginning of a new school year, it’s also budgeting season for K-12 districts and their administration. K-12 budgeting requires careful planning and a focus on meeting the educational needs of students and maintain financial sustainability. Representing approximately 70% of a school district’s budget, staffing and employee benefits are the costliest expenditure and a crucial area to closely review while budgeting. A Staffing and Enrollment Report is a great tool to help school districts review and plan effectively for the following school year.

What is a Staffing and Enrollment Report?

This report provides detailed information about the number of students enrolled in your district and the corresponding staff levels. These reports collect staffing data for administrators, professional staff, and support staff, identified by program, grade level, department, or building. They also include data collected regarding student enrollment, typically gathered on the first day of school, grade level, program, and building.

“A school district’s primary goal is to educate our students. Our largest budget item is staff salary and benefits. These two facts, education and budget, make the Staffing and Enrollment Report a critical building block in providing a quality education, while creating a responsible budget.”

– Dr. Brian Ulmer, Superintendent of the Jersey Shore Area School District

Once all data has been collected, the report is used to analyze changes in staffing and enrollment to be used to identify potential needs for additional resources and staff.

Benefits of a Staffing and Enrollment Report

The report also serves as a transparent communication tool for administration, the Board of Directors, members of the school community, and the community-at-large by displaying the detail of the costliest budget expenditure. The data collected and analyzed through these reports can help K-12 school districts:

Determine the professional staffing needs of the district for the upcoming school year based upon the forgoing studies.
Make recommendations to the Board based upon the considerations set forth in the Public School Code, concerning whether any professional or temporary professional employee positions should be maintained, added, reduced or eliminated during the 2023-2024 school year.
Make recommendations to the Board to add, eliminate or reduce position(s), implement the established procedures through retirement, resignation, termination of specific professional and classified employees.
Notify any temporary professional, professional, and classified support employees who may be affected by the recommendations.
Notify any permanent professional employees or classified support employee who may be affected by a transfer.

This data will help effectively inform those members, guide conversation, and assist in decision making.

How to Present Your Report

As you begin to build your report to present, keep in mind that the data you want to display is dependent on your school district audience. It’s also important to consider whether that audience can easily understand the data recorded. Too much data can be overwhelming, and the key takeaways can be lost; therefore it’s important to be sure that you address these two areas:

Tell the story about what is happening in your school district based on the data; for example, the need for additional staffing to improve student education.
Share insights that help you make decisions for the upcoming school year.

As you compile your report, visual representations of your data can make it easier to understand and help show trends that may have been overlooked. Use graphs, tables, and charts that visually display constancy or changes in your data. Your Staffing and Enrollment Report also needs to be user-friendly. Does your audience find the report self-explanatory? Are there any terms that your audience won’t understand? Customize your Staffing Enrollment Report to meet your school district needs.

Partnering with SitelogIQ

At SitelogIQ, we partner with K-12 school districts to enhance the learning environment, bringing comfort, functionality, and efficiency to the classroom through our K-12 school construction and related solutions.

Our team of dedicated experts, including retired or previous school administrators and support staff, understands your district and community needs and can help develop a plan that fits your educational goals, both now and well into the future.

Reach out to us today as you prepare for budgeting season for assistance with your Staffing and Enrollment report and capital planning needs.

About the Author

Cathy Keegan is a Senior Business Consultant for SitelogIQ Northeast. She first joined SitelogIQ in 2023 with over 24 years of experience in public education, serving various roles such as Superintendent of Schools and Assistant Executive Director for Pennsylvania K-12 school districts. Her experience leading school districts through construction, design, and project management allows her to partner closely with SitelogIQ’s K-12 customers to thoroughly understand their needs and develop a plan that first their educational goals.  

Cathy attended Lehigh Carbon Community College, Cedar Crest College, Lehigh University, and Immaculata University, earning her doctorate in April of 2018. She is also an Adjunct Professor, Dissertation Chairperson, and Dissertation Committee Member for Immaculata University.